Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-18297 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-18297 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-18297?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.8, published 20 August 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- GStreamer gst-plugins-base < 1.28.5.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-18297?
- A patch was published on 2026-07-29: GStreamer gst-plugins-base 1.28.5 released with fix Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-18297 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access or over the network, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-18297?
- Check whether you run Gstreamer. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
Technical details
A stack-based and heap-based buffer overflow exists in the Opus audio decoder within gst-plugins-base when processing Opus streams with more than 64 channels. The vulnerability stems from insufficient validation of the channel count field in the stream header; the decoder uses this untrusted value to determine the size of memory operations on fixed-size 64-element arrays, resulting in out-of-bounds writes. Exploitation requires user interaction (opening a malicious audio file or visiting a malicious page), but no authentication is needed. An attacker can trigger application crashes, denial of service, data corruption, or potentially achieve arbitrary code execution through stack manipulation or pointer corruption. The vulnerability was patched in GStreamer gst-plugins-base version 1.28.5 and later.
Affected products
- GStreamer gst-plugins-base < 1.28.5
Timeline
- 2026-05-21: disclosed: Vulnerability reported to vendor
- 2026-07-29: patched: GStreamer gst-plugins-base 1.28.5 released with fix
- 2026-07-29: advisory: ZDI and CVE advisory published