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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Workaround

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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
Metrics cvssV4_0

{'score': 7.3, 'vector': 'CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:H/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N'}


Projects

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: GitHub_M

Published:

Updated: 2026-10-30T14:52:21.006Z

Reserved: 2026-07-10T17:38:57.110Z

Link: CVE-2026-61626

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Deferred

Published: 2026-10-30T15:16:52.500

Modified: 2026-10-30T19:39:14.897

Link: CVE-2026-61626

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

Updated: 2026-10-30T16:45:15Z

Weaknesses