Information Security 3 min read

High‑Severity Vulnerabilities Discovered in Notepad++ (CVE‑2023‑40031, CVE‑2023‑40036, CVE‑2023‑40164, CVE‑2023‑40166)

Security researchers have identified four high‑severity buffer‑overflow vulnerabilities (CVE‑2023‑40031, CVE‑2023‑40036, CVE‑2023‑40164, CVE‑2023‑40166) in the popular open‑source editor Notepad++, disclosed after the developers failed to patch them before the release of version 8.5.6, urging users to apply mitigations.

IT Services Circle
IT Services Circle
IT Services Circle
High‑Severity Vulnerabilities Discovered in Notepad++ (CVE‑2023‑40031, CVE‑2023‑40036, CVE‑2023‑40164, CVE‑2023‑40166)

Notepad++ is a well‑known open‑source code editor that has attracted the attention of security researchers.

Researchers discovered several high‑severity vulnerabilities with a CVSS score of 7.8/10, including four buffer‑overflow issues.

Although the vulnerabilities were reported to the developers at the end of April 2023, they remained unfixed until the release of Notepad++ v8.5.6.

Because more than three months passed without a fix, the researchers publicly disclosed the vulnerabilities and proof‑of‑concept code to warn users and pressure the developers.

Vulnerability details:

CVE‑2023‑40031: heap buffer write overflow in Utf8_16_Read::convert .

CVE‑2023‑40036: global buffer read overflow in CharDistributionAnalysis::HandleOneChar , exploitable via crafted files.

CVE‑2023‑40164: global buffer read overflow in nsCodingStateMachine::NextState .

CVE‑2023‑40166: heap buffer read overflow in FileManager::detectLanguageFromTextBegining .

The full advisory can be found at the GitHub Security Lab link: https://securitylab.github.com/advisories/GHSL-2023-092_Notepad__/#resources .

Open-sourceinformation securityCVEvulnerabilityNotepad
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