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Fencer Intel
critical 9.8

CVE-2015-8389 in the critical feed json

PCRE before 8.38 mishandles the /(?:|a|){100}x/ pattern and related patterns, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (i…

published 10y ago modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2015-8271

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
3.9%
EPSS 3.9% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 90%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

PCRE before 8.38 mishandles the /(?:|a|){100}x/ pattern and related patterns, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite recursion) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by a JavaScript RegExp object encountered by Konqueror.

Patch / fix

  • php php 5.5.32, 5.6.18, 7.0.3
  • pcre3 Debian 12 2:8.38-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2015-8389

  • pcre SLES for SAP 12 SP2, SLES for SAP 12 SP1, SLES for SAP 12 +12 more 8.39-7.1
  • pcre SLES for SAP 12 SP2, SLES for SAP 12 SP1, SLES for Raspberry Pi 12 SP2 +10 more 8.39-5.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2016:3161-1SUSE-SU-2016:2971-1

Is CVE-2015-8389 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2015-8389 updated cvss 4.3

pcre: infinite recursion in JIT compiler when processing certain patterns (8.38/21)

  • Red Hat Directory Server 8 pcre Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 pcre Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 pcre, glib2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 pcre, glib2, glib2-fam, pcre-tools, glib2-tests, virtuoso-opensource, +1 more Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Web Server 1 httpd Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Web Server 2 jbcs-httpd24, jbcs-httpd24-runtime
    +2 more products
    Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Web Server 3 pcre Red Hat Software Collections php54-php, php55-php, php54-php-gd, php55-php-gd, rh-php56-php, php54-php-cli, +89 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

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

Exploit prediction

3.89% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 90% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-119 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer
  • CWE-185 Incorrect Regular Expression
Technology feeds

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.