uutils coreutils expr Local Denial of Service via Eager Evaluation of Parenthesized Subexpressions

A logic error in the expr utility of uutils coreutils causes the program to evaluate parenthesized subexpressions during the parsing phase rather than at the execution phase. This implementation flaw prevents the utility from performing proper short-circuiting for logical OR (|) and AND (&) operations. As a result, arithmetic errors (such as division by zero) occurring within "dead" branches, branches that should be ignored due to short-circuiting, are raised as fatal errors. This divergence from GNU expr behavior can cause guarded expressions within shell scripts to fail with hard errors instead of returning expected boolean results, leading to premature script termination and breaking GNU-compatible shell control flow.

Source published

22 Apr 2026 16:09:14 UTC

Source modified

22 Apr 2026 17:00:13 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

Source terms

CVE Program Terms of Use

Original source record · Cite this exact observation · Complete original publisher JSON

This view projects the publisher's source fields for reading; the original JSON retains additional fields and CVE enrichment containers. Attribution: cve-program · CVE Program Terms of Use. Source text is retained; field grouping and change labels are provided by ChangeIntel.

CVSS 3.1 · 3.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L