Vulnerability in GNU Glibc

CVE-2026-3904

Calling NSS-backed functions that support caching via nscd may call the nscd client side code and in the GNU C Library version 2.36 under high load on x86_64 systems, the client may call memcmp on inputs that are concurrently modified by other processes or threads and crash. The nscd client in the GNU C Library uses the memcmp function with inputs that may be concurrently modified by another thread, potentially resulting in spurious cache misses, which in itself is not a security issue.  However in the GNU C Library version 2.36 an optimized implementation of memcmp was introduced for x86_64 which could crash when invoked with such undefined behaviour, turning this into a potential crash of the nscd client and the application that uses it. This implementation was backported to the 2.35 branch, making the nscd client in that branch vulnerable as well.  Subsequently, the fix for this issue was backported to all vulnerable branches in the GNU C Library repository. It is advised that distributions that may have cherry-picked the memcpy SSE2 optimization in their copy of the GNU C Library, also apply the fix to avoid the potential crash in the nscd client.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 6.2 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (5.2th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 5th percentile — 5.2% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-3904: held from 0.001 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.001 · newest: 0.002 · change: +0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-3904?
CVE-2026-3904 is a medium-severity vulnerability in GNU Glibc, classified under Race Condition within a Thread. CVSS score: 6.2/10. Published 2026-03-11.
How severe is CVE-2026-3904?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.2 out of 10.