CVE-2026-3608 PUBLISHED

Stack overflow in Kea daemons

Assigner: isc
Reserved: 05.03.2026 Published: 25.03.2026 Updated: 25.03.2026

Sending a maliciously crafted message to the kea-ctrl-agent, kea-dhcp-ddns, kea-dhcp4, or kea-dhcp6 daemons over any configured API socket or HA listener can cause the receiving daemon to exit with a stack overflow error. This issue affects Kea versions 2.6.0 through 2.6.4 and 3.0.0 through 3.0.2.

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 ISC
Product Kea
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 2.6.0 to 2.6.4 (incl.)
  • affected from 3.0.0 to 3.0.2 (incl.)

Exploits

We are not aware of any active exploits.

Workarounds

Securing the API sockets with TLS, and requiring the client to authenticate with a certificate (mutual authentication), prevents the attacker from establishing an API connection to Kea. Set cert-required to true (the default) to require a client certificate. See: https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/stable/arm/security.html#tls-https-configuration

Solutions

Upgrade to the patched release most closely related to your current version of Kea: 2.6.5 or 3.0.3.

Credits

  • ISC would like to thank Ali Norouzi of Keysight for bringing this vulnerability to our attention.

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-617 Reachable Assertion CWE

Impacts

  • Loss of DHCP services