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Classic Buffer OverflowWeakness · CWE-120

CVE-2026-42859

HIGH · 8.1 CVSS v4.0 Published 2026-05-11
Patch available
A vendor patch is available. No clean upgrade release — apply the published patch.
See remediation →
90/100
Remediation priority · Urgent
Remotely reachable No privileges Zero-click Patch available

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
Neat VNC is a VNC server library. Prior to 0.9.6, a pre-authentication stack buffer overflow exists in neatvnc in the RSA-AES security type handler. An unauthenticated remote attacker who can reach the VNC listening socket can send a crafted security type 5 (RSA-AES) or security type 129 (RSA-AES-256) handshake with an oversized client RSA public key, causing rsa_aes_send_challenge in src/auth/rsa-aes.c to overflow a 1024-byte on-stack buffer when encrypting the server challenge. This results in at least a denial of service via server crash. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.9.6.

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-120

A fixed-size buffer is filled without checking the length of the incoming data, so it overflows into neighbouring memory. This is the classic overflow attackers use to overwrite return addresses and hijack execution. The fix is strict length checks and safe, bounded string and memory functions.

General guidance for the classic buffer overflow class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

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
Authentication
X
User interaction
None
Scope
X

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

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
Patch available Apply the vendor patch
Vendor patch github.com →
Recommended fix High confidence

0.9.6

  1. Identify the currently installed neatvnc version using your system's package manager or build system
  2. Upgrade neatvnc to version 0.9.6 or later
  3. Verify the upgrade was successful by checking the installed version
  4. Restart any services or applications that use neatvnc to ensure the patched version is loaded
  5. If building from source, ensure you pull the commit 1f6cd6b75cc167fed3a19a9d1552a1f662f6b337 or use the 0.9.6 release tag

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

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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-2026-42859 in production — separate from our analysis above.

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