Skip to content

GHSA-5pv5-xh52-hvrp CVE-2026-35378

uutils coreutils has an Incorrect Short Circuit Evaluation Issue

Low crates.io
Severity
3.3 / 10
Low · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS)
0.16%
Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 4.74% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited
No
Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness
CWE-768 Incorrect Short Circuit Evaluation
Fix
0.8.0
Upgrade coreutils to this version or later

Description

A logic error in the expr utility of uutils coreutils causes the program to evaluate parenthesized subexpressions during the parsing phase rather than at the execution phase. This implementation flaw prevents the utility from performing proper short-circuiting for logical OR (|) and AND (&) operations. As a result, arithmetic errors (such as division by zero) occurring within "dead" branches, branches that should be ignored due to short-circuiting, are raised as fatal errors. This divergence from GNU expr behavior can cause guarded expressions within shell scripts to fail with hard errors instead of returning expected boolean results, leading to premature script termination and breaking GNU-compatible shell control flow.

Affected versions

crates.io

PackageVulnerableFixed in
coreutils
< 0.8.0
0.8.0

How to fix

Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.

coreutils crates.io → 0.8.0

cargo
cargo update -p coreutils --precise 0.8.0

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.1 3.3

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

Attack vector
Local
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low

Weakness

CWE-768: Incorrect Short Circuit Evaluation

The product contains a conditional statement with multiple logical expressions in which one of the non-leading expressions may produce side effects. This may lead to an unexpected state in the program after the execution of the conditional, because short-circuiting logic may prevent the side effects from occurring.

How to prevent it
  • Implementation: Minimizing the number of statements in a conditional that produce side effects will help to prevent the likelihood of short circuit evaluation to alter control flow in an unexpected way.

References

Timeline

  1. Published
  2. Last updated by the source
  3. Latest EPSS score
AdvisorySeverityWhy it's related
GHSA-m2pg-c7m6-77pj
uutils coreutils has an Improper Input Validation Issue in its cut Utility
Medium Also affects coreutils
GHSA-fhr3-xh3q-69w6
uutils coreutils has an Incorrect Provision of Specified Functionality Issue
Low Also affects coreutils
GHSA-5v4g-vw9x-h534
uutils coreutils has an Improper Input Validation Issue in its env Utility
Low Also affects coreutils
GHSA-6g8r-74qp-6859
uutils coreutils has a Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition
Medium Also affects coreutils
GHSA-vx9m-xjwf-8cqm
uutils coreutils has an Improper Handling of Unicode Encoding Issue
Low Also affects coreutils
GHSA-4wrp-79m8-9m9p
uutils coreutils has a Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition
Medium Also affects coreutils
GHSA-wq63-vh5h-pr5p
uutils coreutils has a UNIX Symbolic Link (Symlink) Following issue
Medium Also affects coreutils
GHSA-mh5c-xrmh-m794
uutils coreutils has an Untrusted Search Path
High Also affects coreutils
Is this in your code?

MergeHarbor checks every repository's dependencies against this database, ranks what matters by exploitability and reachability, routes it to the owning team and opens the fix pull request.

Check your repos with MergeHarbor