Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-38752 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-38752 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-38752?
- Informational severity, published 15 July 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Busybox commit 371fe9.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-38752?
- A patch was published on 2026-06-16: Patch submitted to BusyBox mailing list by Sanghyun Park Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-38752 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-38752?
- Check whether you run Busybox 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
A stack overflow vulnerability exists in the evaluate() function within editors/awk.c of BusyBox (specifically commit 371fe9). The issue stems from a lack of recursion depth tracking in recursive AWK function calls, which can lead to process stack exhaustion. An attacker who can provide a crafted AWK script to be executed by the vulnerable BusyBox binary can trigger this overflow to cause a crash (Denial of Service). A patch has been proposed to implement a MAX_AWK_FUNC_DEPTH limit (set to 1000) to prevent uncontrolled recursion.
Affected products
- BusyBox BusyBox commit 371fe9
Timeline
- 2026-06-16: patched: Patch submitted to BusyBox mailing list by Sanghyun Park
- 2026-07-15: disclosed: CVE published to NVD