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Pcre2Application · Pcre

CVE-2015-3210

CRITICAL · 9.8 CVSS v3.1 Published 2016-12-13
No fix yet
No fix has been published. The vendor has not shipped a fixed release or patch. You remain exposed.
See remediation →
100/100
Remediation priority · Urgent
Public exploit Remotely reachable No privileges Zero-click

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
Heap-based buffer overflow in PCRE 8.34 through 8.37 and PCRE2 10.10 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by /^(?P=B)((?P=B)(?J:(?P<B>c)(?P<B>a(?P=B)))>WGXCREDITS)/, a different vulnerability than CVE-2015-8384.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-787

The program writes past the bounds of a buffer, overwriting adjacent memory an attacker can turn to their advantage. Crafted input can overwrite control data and redirect execution. Remediation is validating every index and length before a write, plus modern memory-safety mitigations.

General guidance for the out-of-bounds write class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

Affected products & versions What the vendor confirmedThe version ranges the vendor confirmed as vulnerable. If your version sits inside a range here, treat yourself as exposed until you have upgraded.

NVD · CPE data
Pcre2Application
Affected:= 10.10
PcreApplication
Affected:= 8.34= 8.35= 8.36= 8.37

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High

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

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Recommended fix High confidence

PCRE 8.38+ or PCRE2 10.20+ (depending on which library branch is in use)

  1. Identify all applications and libraries that link to the affected PCRE (8.34-8.37) or PCRE2 (10.10) libraries
  2. Stop services or applications that use PCRE/PCRE2 before updating
  3. Upgrade PCRE 8.x to version 8.38 or later from the official PCRE distribution (pcre.org)
  4. Upgrade PCRE2 from version 10.10 to version 10.20 or later
  5. Rebuild any applications that were statically linked against the old PCRE/PCRE2 libraries
  6. Verify the new library versions are loaded: `pcre-config --version` for PCRE or check PCRE2 version via `pcre2-config --version`
  7. Restart services that use PCRE/PCRE2 after the upgrade
  8. Test that regex-dependent functionality still works correctly
Caveat Minor: Regex behavior should be consistent, but test thoroughly as PCRE2 has differences from PCRE 8.x; some deprecated PCRE-specific features may not exist in PCRE2

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

No vendor fix exists Pcre2 has not published a patch for this.

There is no version to upgrade to and no patch to apply. Every affected install stays exposed until the vendor ships a fix — or somebody else builds one.

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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2015-3210 in production — separate from our analysis above.

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