Git for Windows 2.56.1 closes clone-time code execution flaw

Git for Windows 2.56.1, announced by Johannes Schindelin, patches six security flaws, the most serious of which lets a malicious repository run attacker-chosen code when someone clones it recursively.

CVE-2026-111760 is a remote code execution bug in recursive clones. An attacker-controlled repository can trick Git into replacing a submodule gitfile with a symbolic link that points at a directory holding malicious configuration or hooks, so the clone runs the attacker's code.

CVE-2026-113408 is a path traversal in reference handling. A server can advertise an unborn HEAD whose name contains traversal sequences such as refs/heads/../../../TARGET. With the files ref backend, later ref updates can then write files the user did not intend to touch.

Three further flaws are denial-of-service or memory-safety bugs rather than straightforward code execution. CVE-2026-114467: when Git strips GPG signatures from a commit message it only accounts for two signatures, so a message with more than two corrupts stack memory. That can be triggered by merging a tag with extra signatures, including on forges that start a merge after such a tag is pushed. CVE-2026-114469: Git refuses patches larger than about 1 GiB, but the check looks at the encoded input size, so a compressed binary patch can inflate past that limit and crash Git with an out-of-bounds read. CVE-2026-105437: while merging, Git can overflow the calculation of the buffer that holds the merge result on very large merges.

The release also lists CVE-2026-114466 among the six issues it addresses. Schindelin's announcement does not describe that flaw.