CVE-2018-7186 Memory corruption in n/a

What is CVE-2018-7186?

CVE-2018-7186 is a critical memory corruption vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 16 Feb 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Leptonica before 1.75.3 does not limit the number of characters in a %s format argument to fscanf or sscanf, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (stack-based buffer overflow) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a long string, as demonstrated by the gplotRead and ptaReadStream functions.

Weakness: CWE-787

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-7186?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Leptonica Leptonica.

How do I fix CVE-2018-7186?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.

Is CVE-2018-7186 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-7186 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-7186, GHSA-hx3c-v527-xcjq, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-7186.