Git 2.56.1 fixes six security vulnerabilities, the most serious of which lets a malicious repository execute code on a machine that clones it recursively.
The Git project released the fixes on November 10, with backports to 2.55.1, 2.54.1, 2.53.1, 2.52.1, 2.51.3 and 2.50.2. The code-execution bug, CVE-2026-111760, comes from an integer truncation in index handling. An extremely long path can pass Git's safety check under one name, then get written under a shorter one. An attacker can use that to replace a submodule's .git file with a symbolic link to a directory holding malicious configuration or hooks.
The other five are memory and file-access problems:
- CVE-2026-113408: a server can advertise a HEAD pointing to an unborn branch with path-traversal components in its name, letting a later operation write outside the reference directory.
- CVE-2026-114467: a tag with more than two GPG signatures can overflow a fixed-size stack array during a merge, causing memory corruption or a crash.
- CVE-2026-114469: a small, compressed binary patch can expand past Git's roughly 1 GiB limit and trigger an out-of-bounds read.
- CVE-2026-105437: a size calculation can overflow during very large merges, producing a too-small buffer and heap corruption.
- CVE-2026-114466: three fast-import features could read arbitrary files or write to them. They are now blocked in untrusted streams unless the caller passes --allow-unsafe-features.
Several of these share a pattern: Git validated one form of the data, then acted on another. A path was checked before truncation, a patch before decompression, a signature count against an assumption of two. Fixes in each case close the gap with length checks, checked arithmetic or an unbounded array.
The exposure reaches beyond developers' laptops. The advisories say hosting services that merge on behalf of users, and applications that merge untrusted content, can be affected. GitHub said it has patched github.com and its Enterprise Cloud offerings, and released Enterprise Server versions 3.19.15, 3.20.11, 3.21.9 and 3.22.4. It is coordinating updates to GitHub Desktop and the GitHub Copilot app.
GitHub also recommended updating any application that bundles its own copy of Git, which means a system package update alone may leave some tools exposed. For those who cannot update right away, it advised cloning only from trusted servers and avoiding recursive clones of untrusted repositories, while noting that these steps do not replace the patch.