CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-3904 — Gnu Glibc security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.2

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.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.2 (3.1)
Published
2026-03-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-366

Affected products

  • gnu / glibc

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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