Description

X.509IF protocol dissector crash in 4.6.0 to 4.6.7 and 4.4.0 to 4.4.18 allows denial of service

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-19T23:16:21.570Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-19T23:16:21.570Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability involves a denial of service condition residing within the X.509IF protocol dissector affecting specific software versions.\nThe primary impact of this flaw is the termination or freezing of the affected application, leading to a complete denial of service for users relying on the protocol processing capabilities.\nThe vulnerability affects versions 4.6.0 to 4.6.7 and 4.4.0 to 4.4.18.\nThe risk implications are significant for environments where continuous packet analysis and network monitoring are critical, as an unauthenticated attacker can disrupt operations by causing the parser to crash.\nAttacker capabilities include the ability to trigger the vulnerability remotely by injecting malformed or crafted X.509IF protocol packets into the targeted parsing engine.\nExploitation requirements generally involve network access to the parsing system, allowing the transmission of malicious protocol payloads designed to trigger the underlying software defect during dissection.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability exists within the X.509IF protocol dissector component responsible for parsing and interpreting protocol traffic.\nThe root cause stems from improper input validation or boundary handling when processing specially crafted fields within X.509IF messages, leading to memory corruption, an unhandled exception, or an assertion failure.\nThe vulnerable component is explicitly the X.509IF protocol dissector module present in versions 4.6.0 through 4.6.7 and 4.4.0 through 4.4.18.\nExploitation occurs when an attacker transmits a maliciously constructed network packet utilizing the X.509IF protocol to a system actively running the vulnerable dissector.\nThe attack flow begins with the network interface capturing or receiving the crafted packet, which is subsequently handed off to the protocol analysis engine.\nAs the X.509IF dissector attempts to parse the malicious payload fields, it encounters unexpected data structures, invalid lengths, or malformed ASN.1 encodings that trigger the software crash.\nNo authentication or elevated privileges are required to initiate this attack, provided the target system is exposed to the untrusted network traffic containing the malicious payload.\nNetwork exposure is a primary vector, as the dissector typically processes live network feeds, capture files, or remote streams.\nThe payload behavior is focused strictly on disrupting availability rather than achieving remote code execution or privilege escalation, resulting in an immediate application crash.\nThe post-exploitation impact is limited to denial of service, forcing administrators to restart the affected application or service, thereby disrupting ongoing network analysis and monitoring operations."
}