comm: lossy UTF-8 conversion silently corrupts non-UTF-8 output
The comm utility in uutils coreutils silently corrupts data by performing lossy UTF-8 conversion on all output lines. The implementation uses String::from_utf8_lossy(), which replaces invalid UTF-8 byte sequences with the Unicode replacement character (U+FFFD). This behavior differs from GNU comm, which processes raw bytes and preserves the original input. This results in corrupted output when the utility is used to compare binary files or files using non-UTF-8 legacy encodings. --- _Zellic finding 3.34. Reported in the Zellic *uutils coreutils Program Security Assessment* (for Canonical, Jan 2026), audited commit `3a07ffc5a9bd4c283e75afa548ba1f1957bad242`._
describes (1)
Related CVEs.
| ID | severity | exploitable | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2026-35346US | — | — | ||
The comm utility in uutils coreutils silently corrupts data by performing lossy UTF-8 conversion on all output lines. The implementation uses String::from_utf8_lossy(), which repla… | ||||
references
External citations — patches, advisories, analysis.
- https://github.com/uutils/coreutilsPACKAGE
- https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/commit/b9372e509ea9b278fe13763237067a261bb8c946WEB
- https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/10192WEB
- https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/10206WEB
- https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/tag/0.6.0WEB
- https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/security/advisories/GHSA-6gcw-w7cp-94g9WEB
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-35346ADVISORY
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