CVE-2026-20700
HIGHCVE-2026-20700 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.8) Buffer Overflow vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2026-02-12) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
A memory corruption issue was addressed with improved state management. This issue is fixed in iOS 26.3 and iPadOS 26.3, macOS Tahoe 26.3, tvOS 26.3, visionOS 26.3, watchOS 26.3. An…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-02-12. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2026-03-05.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2026-20700.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-20700 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,415 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A memory corruption issue was addressed with improved state management. This issue is fixed in iOS 26.3 and iPadOS 26.3, macOS Tahoe 26.3, tvOS 26.3, visionOS 26.3, watchOS 26.3. An attacker with memory write capability may be able to execute arbitrary code. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 26. CVE-2025-14174 and CVE-2025-43529 were also issued in response to this report.
Affected Products
ipadosappleiphone osapplemacosappletvosapplevisionosapplewatchosappleResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Remediation status
No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2026-20700 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Stop feeding it untrusted input: reject or quarantine files and payloads from unverified sources until you can upgrade, restrict accepted formats to the ones you actually need, and run the parsing or decoding step in a least-privileged sandbox or short-lived worker so a crash or corrupted read cannot reach the rest of the process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-20700 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.