Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-38636 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-38636 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-38636?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.5, published 28 August 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Redox OS Relibc commit 61f42d and earlier.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-38636?
- A patch was published on 2026: Fix available in merge request 980 Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-38636 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-38636?
- Check whether you run Redox OS Relibc at an affected version. 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
The vulnerability is a panic-on-invalid-input flaw in the seekdir() function (src/header/dirent/mod.rs) in relibc. The function calls .expect() on a type conversion operation without first validating that the input offset parameter is non-negative. An attacker can invoke seekdir() with a negative c_long offset value, which causes the .try_into() conversion to fail and trigger the expect() panic, resulting in a denial of service. The attack vector is local; the attacker must be able to execute code that calls the vulnerable function. A fix is available in GitLab merge request 980 (commit 61f42d6b).
Affected products
- Redox OS relibc commit 61f42d and earlier
Timeline
- 2026-08-28: disclosed
- 2026: patched: Fix available in merge request 980