CVE-2016-3191: Pcre

Critical severity, CVSS 9.8. EPSS: 8.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The compile_branch function in pcre_compile.c in PCRE 8.x before 8.39 and pcre2_compile.c in PCRE2 before 10.22 mishandles patterns containing an (*ACCEPT) substring in conjunction with nested parentheses, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (stack-based buffer overflow) via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by a JavaScript RegExp object encountered by Konqueror, aka ZDI-CAN-3542.

Affected products

• Pcre Pcre: version 8.00 only; version 8.01 only; version 8.02 only; version 8.10 only; version 8.11 only; version 8.12 only; …
• Pcre PCRE2: up to and including 10.21

Published 2016-03-17. Last modified 2026-06-17.