libass is a portable subtitle renderer for the ASS/SSA (Advanced Substation Alpha/Substation Alpha) subtitle format. From 0.17.4 until 0.17.5, libass event pruning does not guard negative Matroska `ReadOrder` values, allowing an attacker to clear arbitrarily many bits to zero at attacker-controlled positions near the NULL pointer. Exploitation requires a malicious Matroska stream loaded through `ass_process_chunk`, enabled read-order checking, and later pruning of the malicious events. Read-order checking is enabled by default unless `ass_set_check_readorder` is called with zero; pruning must occur explicitly through `ass_prune_events` or through automatic pruning previously enabled with `ass_configure_prune`. On common systems with arithmetic right shift, 32-bit int values, the upper address region reserved to the kernel, and matching binary/kernel architecture, the expected consequence is denial of service. More extensive exploitation on uncommon systems is theoretical and strongly constrained by the target addresses, bit-clearing-only mutation, and ASLR. This issue is fixed in version 0.17.5.
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History
Fri, 30 Oct 2026 15:00:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| Description | libass is a portable subtitle renderer for the ASS/SSA (Advanced Substation Alpha/Substation Alpha) subtitle format. From 0.17.4 until 0.17.5, libass event pruning does not guard negative Matroska `ReadOrder` values, allowing an attacker to clear arbitrarily many bits to zero at attacker-controlled positions near the NULL pointer. Exploitation requires a malicious Matroska stream loaded through `ass_process_chunk`, enabled read-order checking, and later pruning of the malicious events. Read-order checking is enabled by default unless `ass_set_check_readorder` is called with zero; pruning must occur explicitly through `ass_prune_events` or through automatic pruning previously enabled with `ass_configure_prune`. On common systems with arithmetic right shift, 32-bit int values, the upper address region reserved to the kernel, and matching binary/kernel architecture, the expected consequence is denial of service. More extensive exploitation on uncommon systems is theoretical and strongly constrained by the target addresses, bit-clearing-only mutation, and ASLR. This issue is fixed in version 0.17.5. | |
| Title | libass: Out-of-bounds bit clears for negative Matroska ReadOrder values | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-787 | |
| References |
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| Metrics |
cvssV4_0
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Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: GitHub_M
Published:
Updated: 2026-10-30T14:52:21.006Z
Reserved: 2026-07-10T17:38:57.110Z
Link: CVE-2026-61626
No data.
Status : Deferred
Published: 2026-10-30T15:16:52.500
Modified: 2026-10-30T19:39:14.897
Link: CVE-2026-61626
No data.
OpenCVE Enrichment
Updated: 2026-10-30T16:45:15Z
Weaknesses