CVE-2019-15547 — Ncurses
HIGHCVE-2019-15547 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-134 vulnerability in ncurses_project ncurses. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
An issue was discovered in the ncurses crate through 5.99.0 for Rust. There are format string issues in printw functions because C format arguments are mishandled.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2019-15547 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 385,386 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
An issue was discovered in the ncurses crate through 5.99.0 for Rust. There are format string issues in printw functions because C format arguments are mishandled.
Affected Products
ncursesncurses_projectDetection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every ncurses_project ncurses deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2019-15547 yet — track the ncurses_project ncurses advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2019-15547 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.