REDHAT-BUG-2443474: Medium severity vim Vim vulnerability

Q: What does an attacker need to do to trigger the flaw?

Systems are exposed when Vim attempts to recover from a swap file containing crafted pointer-block fields. An attacker would need to cause a user or process to open or recover such a malicious swap file.

Q: Which Vim versions need to be remediated?

Vim versions prior to 9.2.0077 are affected. Updating to version 9.2.0077 or later addresses the issue.

Q: What can be done if patching is not immediately possible?

Until an update can be applied, avoid recovering swap files from untrusted sources and treat unexpected or externally supplied swap files as potentially malicious. The vulnerable code path is swap file recovery logic.

Published Feb 27, 2026

Updated

Vim is an open source, command line text editor. Versions prior to 9.2.0077 have a heap-buffer-overflow and a segmentation fault (SEGV) exist in Vim's swap file recovery logic. Both are caused by unvalidated fields read from crafted pointer blocks within a swap file. Version 9.2.0077 fixes the issue.

Affected Software

1 affected component

vim Vim<9.2.0077

Remediation

Recommended actions to resolve this vulnerability, in priority order.

Upgrade
Upgrade vim to a version that resolves this vulnerability.
Fixed in 9.2.0077

Event History

Feb 27, 2026

Data Sourced

via Red Hat·11:02 PM

DescriptionSeverityAffected Software

Frequently Asked Questions

What does an attacker need to do to trigger the flaw?

Systems are exposed when Vim attempts to recover from a swap file containing crafted pointer-block fields. An attacker would need to cause a user or process to open or recover such a malicious swap file.

Which Vim versions need to be remediated?