CVE-2008-3916: GNU Ed

High severity, CVSS 9.3. EPSS: 3.6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Heap-based buffer overflow in the strip_escapes function in signal.c in GNU ed before 1.0 allows context-dependent or user-assisted attackers to execute arbitrary code via a long filename. NOTE: since ed itself does not typically run with special privileges, this issue only crosses privilege boundaries when ed is invoked as a third-party component.

Affected products

• GNU Ed: version 0.2 only; version 0.3 only; version 0.4 only; version 0.5 only; version 0.6 only; version 0.7 only; …

Published 2008-09-04. Last modified 2026-06-16.