CVE-2005-4872: Pcre

Medium severity, CVSS 4.3. EPSS: 2.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Perl-Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library before 6.2 does not properly count the number of named capturing subpatterns, which allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a regular expression with a large number of named subpatterns, which triggers a buffer overflow. NOTE: this issue was originally subsumed by CVE-2006-7224, but that CVE has been REJECTED and split.

Affected products

• Pcre Pcre: up to and including 6.1

Published 2005-12-31. Last modified 2026-06-16.