Git 2.56.1 fixes six flaws, one allowing code execution on clone

Git 2.56.1 fixes six flaws, one allowing code execution on clone

10 November 2026: The Git project has released Git 2.56.1 to fix six vulnerabilities, the most serious of which, CVE-2026-111760, lets a malicious repository run code on the machine of anyone who clones it recursively. Fixes are backported to 2.55.1, 2.54.1, 2.53.1, 2.52.1, 2.51.3 and 2.50.2.

How a long path becomes a hook

Git checks every path before writing it into a working tree, and refuses paths that would overwrite its own metadata. CVE-2026-111760 gets past that check through an integer truncation in the index: an extremely long path is validated under one name and then written under a shorter one. An attacker uses the gap to replace a submodule's .git file with a symbolic link to a directory holding attacker-written configuration or hooks, which Git then runs during the recursive clone. The fix rejects such long paths.

A recursive clone is the default habit for many build systems and developer scripts, which is what makes this the item to patch first, particularly on CI runners that clone repositories they do not control.

The other five

• CVE-2026-113408: path traversal through the HEAD reference a server advertises when cloning an empty repository over protocol v2 with the files reference backend.
• CVE-2026-114467: stack corruption when stripping signatures from a message that carries more than two, reachable by merging a tag with more than two signatures. The blog notes that hosting services which merge on users' behalf are exposed.
• CVE-2026-114469: an out-of-bounds read and crash on binary patches that expand past Git's limit of about 1 GiB.
• CVE-2026-105437: heap corruption from a size overflow in large merges, including merges with many conflicts and a large conflict-marker size.
• CVE-2026-114466: three git fast-import features that could read arbitrary files or create and append to files are now refused from untrusted streams unless --allow-unsafe-features is given.

The post gives no severity scores and reports no exploitation.

Bundled copies are the slow part

Updating the system Git is quick. The harder part is the copies bundled inside other software: desktop Git clients, IDEs, CI images and container base images that ship their own Git binary. The blog asks users to update those applications as well, which means checking each tool's version rather than assuming the operating system update covers it.

Teams pinned to an older line can take the backport for their series rather than jump to 2.56. The oldest fixed line is 2.50.2; anything older has no patch.

Related on TrustList:

• Cloudflare Artifacts, versioned Git-style storage for AI agents, starts billing on 12 November 2026
• GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency refuses X25519-only TLS clients from 7 October 2026

Sources

• GitHub Blog: Git security vulnerabilities announced, by Elijah Newren, 10 November 2026, 10 November 2026