CVE-2015-1473: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 6.4. EPSS: 2.1% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The ADDW macro in stdio-common/vfscanf.c in the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) before 2.21 does not properly consider data-type size during a risk-management decision for use of the alloca function, which might allow context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (segmentation violation) or overwrite memory locations beyond the stack boundary via a long line containing wide characters that are improperly handled in a wscanf call.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 10.04 only; version 12.04 only; version 14.04 only; version 14.10 only
• GNU Glibc: up to and including 2.20

Published 2015-04-08. Last modified 2026-06-17.