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Fencer Intel
medium 4.0

CVE-2012-2738 json

The VteTerminal in gnome-terminal (vte) before 0.32.2 allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (long loop and CPU con…

published 2012-07-22 14 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2012-2718

cvss
4.0
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
11.2%
EPSS 11.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 95%
public exploits
1
Exploit-DB

Summary

The VteTerminal in gnome-terminal (vte) before 0.32.2 allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (long loop and CPU consumption) via an escape sequence with a large repeat count value.

Patch / fix

  • vte Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1:0.28.2-5

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2012-2738

  • vte Alpine 3.14, Alpine 3.13, Alpine 3.12 +6 more 0.28.2-r12

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2012-2738

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2012-2738 updated cvss 4.3

vte: DoS (long loop) via escape sequences with large repeat counts

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 vte Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 vte
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Timeline

  1. First public exploit (EDB-37477)
  2. Published

Exploit prediction

11.24% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 95% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • EDB-37477 gnome-terminal (vte) VteTerminal - Escape Sequence Parsing Remote Denial of Service dos, 2012-07-03
  • securityfocus.com http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/54281 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 4.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-119 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.