U.S. flag   An official website of the United States government
Dot gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (Dot gov) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

CVE-2026-31973 Detail

Description

SAMtools is a program for reading, manipulating and writing bioinformatics file formats. Starting in version 1.17, in the cram-size command, used to write information about how well CRAM files are compressed, a check to see if the `cram_decode_compression_header()` was missing. If the function returned an error, this could lead to a NULL pointer dereference. Exploiting this bug causes a NULL pointer dereference. Typically this will cause the program to crash. Versions 1.23.1, 1.22.2 and 1.21.1 include fixes for this issue. There is no workaround for this issue.


Metrics

NVD enrichment efforts reference publicly available information to associate vector strings. CVSS information contributed by other sources is also displayed.
CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

Nist CVSS score does not match with CNA score
CNA:  GitHub, Inc.
CVSS-B 6.9 MEDIUM
Vector:  CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

By selecting these links, you will be leaving NIST webspace. We have provided these links to other web sites because they may have information that would be of interest to you. No inferences should be drawn on account of other sites being referenced, or not, from this page. There may be other web sites that are more appropriate for your purpose. NIST does not necessarily endorse the views expressed, or concur with the facts presented on these sites. Further, NIST does not endorse any commercial products that may be mentioned on these sites. Please address comments about this page to [email protected].

URL Source(s) Tag(s)
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/18/12 CVE
https://github.com/samtools/samtools/commit/06fc2a219b3d7c94d3f412c09f6d1efd51199f2f GitHub, Inc.
https://github.com/samtools/samtools/security/advisories/GHSA-x86f-q6fj-cm43 GitHub, Inc.

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source
CWE-476 NULL Pointer Dereference GitHub, Inc.  

Change History

2 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2026-31973
NVD Published Date:
03/18/2026
NVD Last Modified:
03/19/2026
Source:
GitHub, Inc.