MariaDB Connector/J: Server could switch character_set_results away from UTF-8 without the client noticing
CVE-2026-119281
Summary MariaDB Connector/J decodes every result as UTF-8 and guards charactersetclient against a change to another charset, but did not guard charactersetresults, and relied on the server's global sessiontracksystemvariables list to be told about charset changes at all. Details The connector learns about session variable changes through session tracking, and closes the connection when charactersetclient is switched away from UTF-8, so that its UTF-8 decoding stays correct. Two gaps remained: charactersetresults was not guarded: a server could switch it to another charset, after which the bytes of every result were decoded as UTF-8 although encoded otherwise. the list of tracked variables came from the server's global sessiontracksystemvariables: a server configured, or made, not to track the character set variables could change them silently. The fix requests an explicit session tracking list that includes both character set variables whatever the server's global setting, and closes the connection when charactersetresults is changed to a charset other than utf8, utf8mb3 or utf8mb4, as it already did for charactersetclient. Impact Integrity: a malicious or compromised server, or a…
Assessment
- CVSS
- 5.9 (v3.1)
- Severity
- Medium
- EPSS
- 0.00283% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Known exploited
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Exploit availability
- Nothing found in Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or public PoC repositories
- Published
- 30 October 2026
- Last updated
- 30 October 2026
- Affected
- maven · org.mariadb.jdbc:mariadb-java-client
- Weakness
- CWE-838
CVSS vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
At the source
References
- https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-connector-j/security/advisories/GHSA-grfq-r75j-rw9x
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-119281
- https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-connector-j/commit/af5e565eb171cfc66ea8e948ddc616abed0c4623
- https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-connector-j/commit/d51b968c1b795c73d24e0b3f960205b7bc82d423
- https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-connector-j/commit/fdabe74a7df6dce1d6c099f4d0ca1e2acc25919a
- https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-connector-j/releases/tag/3.3.7
- https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-connector-j/releases/tag/3.4.5
- https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-connector-j/releases/tag/3.5.11
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-grfq-r75j-rw9x
Query this programmatically
Agents can read this through the MCP endpoint, or over HTTP:
curl https://cve.zerocrew.in/api/cve/CVE-2026-119281