What is CVE-2019-14878?

CVE-2019-14878 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Newlib Project, classified under NULL Pointer Dereference. CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2020-03-19.

How severe is CVE-2019-14878?

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

NULL pointer dereference in Newlib Project

CVE-2019-14878

In the __d2b function of the newlib libc library, all versions prior to 3.3.0 (see newlib/libc/stdlib/mprec.c), Balloc is used to allocate a big integer, however no check is performed to verify if the allocation succeeded or not. Accessing _x will trigger a null pointer dereference bug in case of a memory allocation failure.

Published 2020-03-19 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

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

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.014 (70.5th percentile), scored 2026-09-30.

Low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, but still tracked. 71st percentile — 70.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.013 · newest: 0.014 · change: +0.000

Affected products

Newlib Project
Red Hat Newlib — versions all newlib versions prior to 3.3.0

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-476 — NULL Pointer Dereference

References

census-labs.com/news/2020/01/31/multiple-null-pointer-dereference-vulnerabiliti… (Exploit, Third Party Advisory)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2019-14878?: CVE-2019-14878 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Newlib Project, classified under NULL Pointer Dereference. CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2020-03-19.
How severe is CVE-2019-14878?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.5 out of 10.