CVE-2020-24240

Publication date 25 August 2020

Last updated 26 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

GNU Bison before 3.7.1 has a use-after-free in _obstack_free in lib/obstack.c (called from gram_lex) when a '\0' byte is encountered. NOTE: there is a risk only if Bison is used with untrusted input, and the observed bug happens to cause unsafe behavior with a specific compiler/architecture. The bug report was intended to show that a crash may occur in Bison itself, not that a crash may occur in code that is generated by Bison.

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
bison	26.04 LTS resolute	Not affected
	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
	22.10 kinetic	Ignored end of life, was needed
	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

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
bison	Upstream: be95a4f

Severity score breakdown

CVSS version: CVSS v3.0

Base score 5.5 · Medium

Base metrics

Parameter	Value
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	Required
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality impact	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High

Scores

Parameter	Value
Base score	5.5 · Medium
Exploitability score	-
Impact score	-

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H