Skip to content
OpenAdvisories
Medium · 6.9 CVE-2026-54559 EUVD-2026-78066GHSA-56r5-2p2f-7cxpPYSEC-2026-3498

PocketSphinx: Buffer overflows in language and acoustic model loading code

Published Sep 14, 2026 · Updated Sep 15, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

PocketSphinx is a small speech recognizer. Prior to 5.1.1, the trie language-model loaders in src/lm/ngram_model_trie.c do not adequately validate boundary conditions in ARPA, DMP, and binary format headers, and the acoustic-model loaders in src/mdef.c and src/util/bio.c use sscanf with unbounded string fields. Loading an invalid, corrupted, or malicious language or acoustic model can therefore cause stack or heap buffer overflows and memory corruption. An attacker who can write to a directory selected by POCKETSPHINX_PATH can replace or add a model file that PocketSphinx later loads; users of PocketSphinx 5prealpha have no backported patch and must migrate to the fixed release. This issue is fixed in version 5.1.1.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
cmusphinx pocketsphinx < 5.1.1 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 pocketsphinx No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS pocketsphinx No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS pocketsphinx No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS pocketsphinx No fix yet —
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pocketsphinx No fix yet —
Show 2 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS pocketsphinx No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS pocketsphinx No fix yet —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
PyPI pocketsphinx < 5.1.1 5.1.1 GHSA-56r5-2p2f-7cxp

References