qax-os/excelize · Security
Excelize: Negative shared-string index causes panic in GetCellValue and GetRows
- GHSA ID
- GHSA-fx5j-qcqg-grpf
- CVE ID
- CVE-2026-59162
- Severity
- medium
- Published
- Updated
- CVSS v4
- 6.9 · CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Description
Negative shared-string index causes panic in GetCellValue and GetRows
Summary
Excelize parses shared-string cell values with strconv.Atoi and checks only the upper bound before indexing the shared string slice. If an XLSX file contains a shared-string cell with <v>-1</v>, the parsed index is negative. The upper-bound check still passes (len(sharedStrings) > -1), and Excelize indexes sharedStrings[-1], causing a runtime panic.
This was reproduced on the current default branch commit 1213a8bd7c5ab360554603ac5c995ccaf6eb4314 and the latest release tag v2.10.1 (5ad5ab3af0054c55bdce09f1530085600e9f2e45). The issue is independent from the row-bound allocation report, so I am reporting it separately.
Affected package
- Package:
github.com/xuri/excelize/v2 - Tested affected versions: current default branch at
1213a8bd7c5ab360554603ac5c995ccaf6eb4314, and releasev2.10.1 - Fixed version: none known at the time of this report
Impact
An attacker who can provide an XLSX file to an application using Excelize can trigger a process panic when the application reads the malicious cell through common APIs such as GetCellValue or GetRows. In services that parse untrusted spreadsheets without a panic recovery boundary, this can cause denial of service.
Root cause
For shared-string cells (t="s"), xlsxC.getValueFrom() parses the cell value as a shared-string index and only checks whether the index is below len(d.SI) before indexing:
xlsxSI, _ := strconv.Atoi(strings.TrimSpace(c.V))
if len(d.SI) > xlsxSI {
return d.SI[xlsxSI].String(), nil
}
For xlsxSI == -1, len(d.SI) > -1 is true, so the code proceeds to index d.SI[-1] and panics.
Minimal worksheet payload
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<worksheet xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main">
<sheetData>
<row r="1"><c r="A1" t="s"><v>-1</v></c></row>
</sheetData>
</worksheet>
The workbook also contains a normal sharedStrings.xml with one string (ok), so the failure is specifically due to accepting a negative index.
Reproduction
Calling GetCellValue("Sheet1", "A1") on the workbook panics:
== negative shared string GetCellValue ==
elapsed=0s alloc_delta=0MB
PANIC: runtime.boundsError runtime error: index out of range [-1]
Calling GetRows("Sheet1") on the same workbook also panics:
== negative shared string GetRows ==
elapsed=0s alloc_delta=0MB
PANIC: runtime.boundsError runtime error: index out of range [-1]
The same results were observed on current default branch commit 1213a8bd7c5ab360554603ac5c995ccaf6eb4314 and on release v2.10.1.
Expected behavior
Malformed shared-string indices should be rejected or treated as missing/invalid string references without panicking.
Suggested remediation
Check both lower and upper bounds before indexing the shared string table. For example:
if xlsxSI >= 0 && xlsxSI < len(d.SI) {
return d.SI[xlsxSI].String(), nil
}
Add regression tests for GetCellValue() and GetRows() on t="s" cells whose <v> value is negative.
CWEs
- CWE-248 · Uncaught Exception
- CWE-755 · Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions
References
- https://github.com/qax-os/excelize/security/advisories/GHSA-fx5j-qcqg-grpf ↗
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-59162 ↗
- https://github.com/qax-os/excelize/pull/2331 ↗
- https://github.com/qax-os/excelize/commit/93f0b3caed37f21ef5079e3259c6c21dcfe68453 ↗
- https://github.com/qax-os/excelize/releases/tag/v2.11.0 ↗
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-fx5j-qcqg-grpf ↗