What is CVE-2018-15120?

CVE-2018-15120 is a medium-severity vulnerability in GNOME Pango, classified under Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer. CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2018-08-24.

How severe is CVE-2018-15120?

Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.5 out of 10.

Buffer overflow in GNOME Pango

CVE-2018-15120

libpango in Pango 1.40.8 through 1.42.3, as used in hexchat and other products, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via crafted text with invalid Unicode sequences.

Vulnerability class: Buffer Overflow

Published 2018-08-24 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 6.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.115 (95.9th percentile), scored 2026-09-30.

Moderate probability of exploitation in the next 30 days — watch for active exploitation reports. 96th percentile — 95.9% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.115 · newest: 0.115 · change: 0.000

Affected products

GNOME Pango
Canonical Ubuntu Linux — versions 18.04

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-119 — Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

References

www.exploit-db.com/exploits/45263/ (Exploit, Patch, VDB Entry, Third Party Advisory, exploit)
github.com/GNOME/pango/blob/1.42.4/NEWS (Third Party Advisory, Release Notes)
usn.ubuntu.com/3750-1/ (vendor-advisory, Third Party Advisory)
github.com/GNOME/pango/commit/71aaeaf020340412b8d012fe23a556c0420eda5f (Patch, Third Party Advisory)
security.gentoo.org/glsa/201811-07 (vendor-advisory, Third Party Advisory)
mail.gnome.org/archives/distributor-list/2018-August/msg00001.html (mailing-list, Patch, Third Party Advisory)
52.117.224.77/xfce4-pdos.webm (Exploit, Third Party Advisory)
www.ign.com/articles/2018/10/16/ps4s-are-reportedly-being-bricked-and-sony-is-w… (Exploit, Third Party Advisory)
www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/9o5efg/message_bricking_console_megathread/ (Third Party Advisory)
www.exploit-db.com/exploits/45263 (Exploit, Patch, VDB Entry, Third Party Advisory)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2018-15120?: CVE-2018-15120 is a medium-severity vulnerability in GNOME Pango, classified under Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer. CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2018-08-24.
How severe is CVE-2018-15120?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.5 out of 10.