GitHub Advisoryadvisory · Go
GHSA-xj69-m9qq-8m94 Quill has unbounded memory allocation via unvalidated size fields in Mach-O binary parsing
MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-31961
- Ecosystem
- Go
- Packages
- github.com/anchore/quill
- Severity
- Moderate
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-770
- Reviewed
- 2026-03-11
Affected packages
• Go github.com/anchore/quill: < 0.7.1 → fixed in 0.7.1
Description
Impact
Quill before version `v0.7.1` contains an unbounded memory allocation vulnerability when parsing Mach-O binaries. Exploitation requires that Quill processes an attacker-supplied Mach-O binary, which is most likely in environments such as CI/CD pipelines, shared signing services, or any workflow where externally-submitted binaries are accepted for signing.
When parsing a Mach-O binary, Quill reads several size and count fields from the `LC_CODE_SIGNATURE` load command and embedded code signing structures (`SuperBlob`, `BlobIndex`) and uses them to allocate memory buffers without validating that the values are reasonable or consistent with the actual file size. Affected fields include `DataSize`, `DataOffset`, and `Size` from the load command, `Count` from the `SuperBlob` header, and `Length` from individual blob headers. An attacker can craft a minimal (~4KB) malicious Mach-O binary with extremely large values in these fields, causing Quill to attempt to allocate excessive memory. This leads to memory exhaustion and denial of service, potentially crashing the host process. Both the Quill CLI and Go library are affected when used to parse untrusted Mach-O files.
Patches
Fixed in Quill `v0.7.1`
Workarounds
None
Credit
Anchore would like to thank opera-aklajn (Opera) for reporting this vulnerability
Resources
• Inside code signing: hashes (Apple documentation)
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-31961 Quill provides simple mac binary signing and notarization from any platform. vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness
References
- https://github.com/anchore/quill/security/advisories/GHSA-xj69-m9qq-8m94 web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-31961 advisory
- https://github.com/anchore/quill/commit/80cf3fe082678af0ec4f9f8dd93f39189d2dc1fe web
- https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3126-inside-code-signing-hashes web
- https://github.com/anchore/quill package
- https://github.com/anchore/quill/releases/tag/v0.7.1 web