CVE-2026-56389

Arbitrary Command Execution in GNU Bison

HIGH
8.6
CVSS Score
Published: July 29, 2026 at 09:39 AM UTC
Updated: October 23, 2026 at 11:10 PM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorBison

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Severity
HIGH8.6
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.2%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

GNU Bison allows for an execution of an arbitrary program during HTML report generation due to improper handling of grammar-defined configuration variables. A grammar file can override the executable used for the XML‑to‑HTML transformation step via %define tool.xsltproc, which is accepted without restriction and passed directly to execvp(). When running bison --html on a attacker-provided grammar, this behavior allows execution of an arbitrary program with the privileges of the Bison process. Maintainers of this project were notified about this vulnerability, and fixed the issue in commit 3169c1e7a2c6acc4c59dfcf8b089896d6881925b. However, they did not provide vulnerable version range. Version 3.8.2 was tested and confirmed as vulnerable, other versions were not tested but might also be vulnerable.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitNot automatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

Attack Vector
LOCAL
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
REQUIRED
Scope
CHANGED
Confidentiality
HIGH
Integrity
HIGH
Availability
HIGH
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusANALYZED
CWE
CWE-78

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