CVE-2026-12413 PUBLISHED

IKEv2 Denial of Service via malformed fragmentation

Assigner: libreswan
Reserved: 16.06.2026 Published: 02.07.2026 Updated: 02.07.2026

An invalidly formatted IKEv2 fragment causes the Libreswan pluto daemon to crash and restart. Continued exploitation would cause a denial of service. The function reassemble_v2_incoming_fragments() would ignore unknown outer payloads but still store these in a fixed size array msg_digest.digest[PAYLIMIT]. An off-by-one error in the assertion PASSERT(logger, md->digest_roof < elemsof(md->digest)) causes the daemon to abort. No remote code execution is possible. Any configuration that allows IKEv2 connections that do not set fragmentation=no are vulnerable. IKEv1 is not affected.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS Score: 7.5

Product Status

Vendor The Libreswan Project
Product libreswan
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 4.6 to 5.3 (incl.)
  • Version 5.3.1 is unaffected

Workarounds

If fragmentation is not needed, fragmentation=no can be added to all IKEv2 configurations. If fragmentation is needed, no workaround is possible and the fix needs to be applied.

Solutions

Upgrade to libreswan 5.3.1 or later. Patches for libreswan 4.15 and 5.3 are available at https://libreswan.org

Credits

  • Hu Xinyao finder

References

Problem Types

  • Off-by-one Error CWE
  • Reachable Assertion CWE