CVE-2026-52859
Published: 11 June 2026
Summary
CVE-2026-52859 is a medium-severity Out-of-bounds Read (CWE-125) vulnerability in Vim Vim. Its CVSS base score is 6.9 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004); ranked at the 22.0th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2026-36283
Vulnerability details
Vim is an open source, command line text editor. Prior to version 9.2.0565, the update_snapshot() function in src/terminal.c copies the visible terminal screen into the scrollback buffer when a snapshot is taken. For each screen cell it walks the cell's…
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chars[] array with no upper bound, stopping only when it encounters a NUL terminator. When a cell legitimately fills all VTERM_MAX_CHARS_PER_CELL (6) slots — a base character plus five combining marks — the bundled libvterm returns the array without a terminating NUL, so the loop reads past the fixed six-element array and appends the out-of-bounds values to a buffer reserved for only six characters. A program whose output is rendered inside a :terminal window can trigger this with a short byte sequence and no Vim scripting, leading to a crash. This issue has been patched in version 9.2.0565.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Out-of-bounds read in terminal rendering leads directly to application crash (DoS) when untrusted output is displayed in :terminal.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
No mitigating controls mapped yet. The per-CVE control annotator has not reached this CVE.