Copyright © 2012 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. Important 2026-11-10T18:00:00 git: git: Heap corruption via integer overflow in merge size calculations 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H CWE-787

Affected versions of Git have a heap buffer overflow in the three-way merge code (xdiff), which an attacker can trigger through a repository they control. When Git merges a file, it first adds up the size of the merged output, allocates a buffer of that size, and then writes the output into it. That total was kept in a 32-bit signed integer. The conflict-marker-size attribute, which can be set from a committed .gitattributes file, accepts any positive integer, and the markers are written several times for every conflict. A small file with a huge marker size and many separate conflicts can therefore push the total past 4 GiB, so the integer wraps to a small value and Git writes attacker-controlled merge output past the end of a buffer that is too small. At minimum this crashes Git, and because the overflow is large and its contents are largely attacker-controlled, worse heap corruption is possible. Any command that does a textual three-way merge can trigger it, such as git-merge(1), git-rebase(1), git-cherry-pick(1), and git-merge-tree(1). The latter is most likely a target for Git forges, which might use git-merge-tree(1) on the server-side to check mergeability. When the server reads attributes from trees in the repository (for example through attr.tree or --attr-source), any user who can push branches and request that they be merged (for example by opening a pull or merge request) can trigger the overflow without anyone else doing anything, and the data they push is small because the oversized output only appears during the merge. The problem has been patched by computing the size as size_t and checking every addition for overflow, so Git stops with an error instead of overflowing. Servers that cannot upgrade right away can add * conflict-marker-size=7 to each repository's info/attributes as a workaround, which overrides any in-tree .gitattributes, or turn off server-side mergeability checks for untrusted repositories.

A flaw was found in Git. When calculating sizes for very large merge results, an integer overflow can occur, leading to the allocation of an undersized buffer. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by supplying crafted repository data during merge operations to cause heap memory corruption. This issue primarily impacts system stability and can result in an application crash, causing a Denial of Service (DoS).

Red Hat rates this flaw as Important because heap memory corruption caused by an integer overflow can lead to arbitrary code execution within the context of the user executing Git. While exploitation can yield severe impacts on confidentiality, integrity, and availability, successful exploitation requires user interaction to initiate merge actions on crafted repository content. In typical Red Hat deployments, risk is primarily concentrated in developer environments and automated CI/CD systems processing untrusted pull requests or branches. Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Affected git Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Affected git Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Affected git Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Affected git Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Affected git Red Hat Hardened Images Affected git Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) Affected rhoai/odh-workbench-codeserver-datascience-cpu-py312-rhel9 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 Affected openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-8 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 Affected openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 Affected openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9 Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces Affected devspaces/code-rhel9 Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces Not affected devspaces/pluginregistry-rhel9 Red Hat Satellite 6 Affected rubygem-git https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-105437 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-105437