PAM-PKCS#11 is a Linux-PAM login module that allows a X.509 certificate based user login. In versions 0.6.12 and prior, the pam_pkcs11 module segfaults when a user presses ctrl-c/ctrl-d when they are asked for a PIN. When a user enters no PIN at all, pam_get_pwd will never initialize the password buffer pointer and as such cleanse will try to dereference an uninitialized pointer. On my system this pointer happens to have the value 3 most of the time when running sudo and as such it will segfault. The most likely impact to a system affected by this issue is an availability impact due to a daemon that uses PAM crashing. As of time of publication, a patch for the issue is unavailable.
A NULL pointer dereference occurs when the application dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid, but is NULL, typically causing a crash or exit.