CVE-2021-3420

Publication date 5 March 2021

Last updated 26 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

A flaw was found in newlib in versions prior to 4.0.0. Improper overflow validation in the memory allocation functions mEMALIGn, pvALLOc, nano_memalign, nano_valloc, nano_pvalloc could case an integer overflow, leading to an allocation of a small buffer and then to a heap-based buffer overflow.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
newlib	25.10 questing	Not affected
	25.04 plucky	Not affected
	24.10 oracular	Not affected
	24.04 LTS noble	Vulnerable
	23.10 mantic	Ignored end of life, was needed
	23.04 lunar	Ignored end of life, was needed
	22.10 kinetic	Ignored end of life, was needs-triage
	22.04 LTS jammy	Vulnerable
	21.10 impish	Ignored end of life
	21.04 hirsute	Ignored end of life
	20.10 groovy	Ignored end of life
	20.04 LTS focal	Vulnerable
	18.04 LTS bionic	Vulnerable
	16.04 LTS xenial	Vulnerable
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not in release
gcc-snapshot	25.10 questing	Not affected
	25.04 plucky	Not affected
	24.10 oracular	Not affected
	24.04 LTS noble	Not affected
	23.10 mantic	Not affected
	23.04 lunar	Not affected
	22.04 LTS jammy	Vulnerable
	20.04 LTS focal	Not affected
	18.04 LTS bionic	Not affected
	16.04 LTS xenial	Not affected
	14.04 LTS trusty	Ignored end of standard support

Notes

eslerm

fixed for newlib-4.0.0 on 2020-11-17 with aa106b29a ("malloc/nano-malloc: correctly check for out-of-bounds allocation reqs")

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	9.8 · Critical
Attack vector	Network
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	High
Integrity impact	High
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H