CVE-2026-56288: GNU Patch

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.1% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

GNU patch is vulnerable to a NULL pointer dereference when processing a specially crafted unified-diff patch file. Improper handling of consecutive end-of-file newline markers can corrupt internal hunk (single block of changes in diff) data structures, causing the application to pass a NULL pointer to fwrite() during patch processing. An attacker can trigger this condition with a malicious patch file, causing the utility to crash and resulting in a denial of service. This issue has been fixed in the commit e6d6a4e021660679d7fc9150f981d4920f722313

Affected products

• GNU Patch: up to and including 2.8.0

Published 2026-07-09. Last modified 2026-07-13.