Integer overflow vulnerability has been found in "builtin.c" program file of gawk. This issue may lead to memory exhaustion on the hosting operating system and could be used to overwrite gawk heap metadata and objects with attacker-controlled bytes. It affects gawk in versions 5.4.0 and below.

An update of the gawk package has been released.

The remote openSUSE 16 host has a package installed that is affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the openSUSE-SU-2026:21393-1 advisory.

    - CVE-2026-40467: use-after-free vulnerability within the do_getline_redir() routine could lead to a     program crash       (bsc#1271351).
    - CVE-2026-40468: use-after-free vulnerability in gawk's io.c file could permit heap metadata     manipulation and host       memory exhaustion (bsc#1271352).
    - CVE-2026-40553: buffer overflow in the ftype() routine of the readdir extension could trigger a program     crash       (bsc#1271354).

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the SUSE security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

The remote SUSE Linux SLES12 host has a package installed that is affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the SUSE- SU-2026:3211-1 advisory.

    This update for gawk fixes the following issue:

    - CVE-2026-40468: integer overflow in the `builtin.c` program file (bsc#1271352).

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the SUSE security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - Integer overflow vulnerability has been found in builtin.c program file of gawk. This issue may lead to     memory exhaustion on the hosting operating system and could be used to overwrite gawk heap metadata and     objects with attacker-controlled bytes. It affects gawk in versions 5.4.0 and below. (CVE-2026-40468)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
331103	Photon OS 5.0: Gawk PHSA-2026-5.0-0933	Nessus	PhotonOS Local Security Checks	medium
329299	openSUSE 16 Security Update : gawk (openSUSE-SU-2026:21393-1)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	medium
329289	SUSE SLES12 Security Update : gawk (SUSE-SU-2026:3211-1)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	low
326566	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2026-40468	Nessus	Misc.	low

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CVE-2026-40468

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