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CVE-2026-31973

NULL pointer dereference in samtools cram-size

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 1.21.1, 1.22.2
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: no
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

SAMtools is a program for reading, manipulating and writing bioinformatics file formats. Starting in version 1.17, in the cram-size command, used to write information about how well CRAM files are compressed, a check to see if the `cram_decode_compression_header()` was missing. If the function returned an error, this could lead to a NULL pointer dereference. Exploiting this bug causes a NULL pointer dereference. Typically this will cause the program to crash. Versions 1.23.1, 1.22.2 and 1.21.1 include fixes for this issue. There is no workaround for this issue.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • samtools samtools

    From 1.17 · fixed in 1.21.1; From 1.22 · fixed in 1.22.2

References 2

GitHub · samtools/samtools