CVE-2026-31972 is a critical use-after-free vulnerability (CWE-416) affecting SAMtools versions up to 1.21, specifically within the `mpileup` command. Rated CVSS 9.8 Critical, this flaw allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely trigger a program crash or leak sensitive program state information with low attack complexity and no user interaction. The issue stems from the `mpileup` command prematurely discarding reference data, leading to an attempt to read from freed memory. There is currently no evidence of active exploitation, public exploit code, or KEV listing, though it has garnered minimal community discussion and media attention. This vulnerability is fixed in SAMtools versions 1.21.1 and 1.22.
| Vendor | Product | Version(s) | CPE |
|---|---|---|---|
< 1.21.1CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:a:samtools:samtools:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |
CVSS version used by this source: 4.0
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X
The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.1 Reddit, 0.3 Bluesky, 0.3 Mastodon, and 2.4 GitHub mentions.
The average CVE in this peer group has 0.3 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.
Remediation records are not available for this CVE.