Expat before 2.8.5 fails to validate that a high surrogate in UTF-16 input is followed by a low surrogate, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can supply UTF-16 encoded XML containing lone high surrogates that consume the following code unit, causing Expat to pass unpaired surrogates to applications built with XML_UNICODE and to silently replace input characters in other builds.
{
"cna_assigner": "VulnCheck",
"cwe_ids": [
"CWE-176"
],
"osv_generated_from": "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/93xxx/CVE-2026-93990.json"
}