Description
Calling NSS-backed functions that support caching via nscd may call the nscd client side code and in the GNU C Library version 2.36 under high load on x86_64 systems, the client may call memcmp on inputs that are concurrently modified by other processes or threads and crash. The nscd client in the GNU C Library uses the memcmp function with inputs that may be concurrently modified by another thread, potentially resulting in spurious cache misses, which in itself is not a security issue. However in the GNU C Library version 2.36 an optimized implementation of memcmp was introduced for x86_64 which could crash when invoked with such undefined behaviour, turning this into a potential crash of the nscd client and the application that uses it. This implementation was backported to the 2.35 branch, making the nscd client in that branch vulnerable as well. Subsequently, the fix for this issue was backported to all vulnerable branches in the GNU C Library repository. It is advised that distributions that may have cherry-picked the memcpy SSE2 optimization in their copy of the GNU C Library, also apply the fix to avoid the potential crash in the nscd client.
Problem types
CWE-366 Race condition within a thread
Product status
2.35 (custom) before 2.37
References
www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/11/5
sourceware.org/...in;f=advisories/GLIBC-SA-2026-0004;hb=HEAD
sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=29863
sourceware.org/...h=8804157ad9da39631703b92315460808eac86b0c
sourceware.org/...h=b712be52645282c706a5faa038242504feb06db5