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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Dec 25, 2021· Updated Aug 3, 2024

Out-of-bounds Read in vim/vim

CVE-2021-4166

Description

Vim contains an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that can be triggered by opening a malicious file, leading to information disclosure or crash.

AI Insight

LLM-synthesized narrative grounded in this CVE's description and references.

Vim contains an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that can be triggered by opening a malicious file, leading to information disclosure or crash.

Vulnerability

CVE-2021-4166 is an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in Vim, a text editor. The issue exists in the code that processes certain file contents, allowing a specially crafted file to cause a read beyond allocated memory boundaries. The exact affected versions are not specified in the available references, but the vulnerability was reported via huntr.dev and subsequently fixed in a later Vim release [4].

Exploitation

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must convince a user to open a malicious file in Vim. No authentication or special privileges are required if the user is running Vim. The attacker does not need network access beyond delivering the file to the victim (e.g., via email, download, or file transfer). Once the file is opened, the out-of-bounds read occurs during parsing.

Impact

Successful exploitation can lead to an unexpected application termination (crash) or, if properly leveraged, may allow an attacker to read sensitive information from the process memory (information disclosure). The impact is limited to the Vim process context; privilege escalation is not directly possible unless Vim is running with elevated privileges, which is uncommon.

Mitigation

As of the provided references, no specific fixed version is mentioned. However, the issue was reported and fixed by the Vim maintainers as part of a security update [4]. Users should update Vim to the latest version available for their distribution or from the official repository. If an update is not immediately available, users should avoid opening untrusted files with Vim.

References
  1. security - Re: 3 new CVE's in vim

AI Insight generated on May 27, 2026. Synthesized from this CVE's description and the cited reference URLs; citations are validated against the source bundle.

Affected products

37

Patches

0

No patches discovered yet.

Vulnerability mechanics

No source-code context for this CVE — mechanics is only generated when we can read the actual fix diff. Without that, the four sections (root cause, attack vector, affected code, fix) would be speculation rather than analysis.

References

12

News mentions

0

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