PGV-2652427 - PocketSphinx: Buffer overflows in language and acoustic model loading codeDisclosed on July 17, 2026 (updated July 18, 2026)
PGV-2652427 is a category 2 vulnerabilty that affects the following packages:
The risk assessment shows that this vulnerability is exlpoited by a external attacker. An unauthorized external actor who attempts to exploit this vulnerability without legitimate access.
The impact is contained to the application. Exploitation remains confined to the application and cannot affect the host environment or external systems.
The threat damage has no measurable impact. Exploitation does not result in a meaningful impact to service or data.
The trie language model code introduced in PocketSphinx 5prealpha failed to check various boundary conditions when reading the headers of ARPA, DMP, and binary format language model files. In the case of invalid, corrupted or malicious input files, this could lead to stack and heap buffer overflows.
In addition, the acoustic model loading code (which is over 30 years old...) contains numerous instances of sscanf with an unbounded string field which could also lead to stack overflows in the case of corrupt or malicious inputs.
Because PocketSphinx will search the directory given by the POCKETSPHINX_PATH environment variable for acoustic and language model files, if this directory is writable by untrusted users, an attacker could corrupt an existing file or write a malicious one to this directory in order to trigger the vulnerability.
The problem has been corrected in PocketSphinx 5.1.1.
There is no patch currently available for users of Pocketsphinx 5prealpha, who are encouraged to migrate as soon as possible to PocketSphinx 5.1.1.
Ensure that the POCKETSPHINX_PATH environment variable is either unset, or set to a directory whose contents are trusted and which cannot be written by untrusted users.
| Network Exposure | External Accessable from the public internet |
| Access Interface | WebBrowser Primarily web-based applications |
| Service Outage | Disruptive Operations would be impacted |
| Data Breach | Disruptive Operations would be impacted |
| Data Tampering | Disruptive Operations would be impacted |
| Customize | |
v2.0.8 © 2026 Inedo, LLC
