CVE-2019-15548 — Ncurses
CRITICALCVE-2019-15548 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) Buffer Overflow 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 instr and mvwinstr buffer overflows because interaction with C functions is mishandled.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2019-15548 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 instr and mvwinstr buffer overflows because interaction with C functions is 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-2019-15548 yet — track the ncurses_project ncurses advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Constrain what reaches the vulnerable code: limit the size and shape of untrusted input, isolate the affected component in a sandboxed or least-privileged process, and enable the platform's memory-safety mitigations (ASLR, stack protector, hardened allocator) so an out-of-bounds access is more likely to fail closed than to be exploitable. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2019-15548 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.