CVE-2026-39849 PUBLISHED

Pi-hole FTL remote code execution via newline injection in dns.interface configuration

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 07.04.2026 Published: 05.05.2026 Updated: 05.05.2026

Pi-hole FTL is the core engine of the Pi-hole network-level advertisement and tracker blocker. In versions before 6.6.1, the dns.interface configuration field in Pi-hole FTL accepted newline characters without validation, allowing an attacker to inject arbitrary directives into the generated dnsmasq configuration file. On installations with no admin password set (the default for many deployments), the configuration API is fully accessible without credentials, allowing a network-adjacent attacker to inject the payload, enable the built-in DHCP server, and achieve arbitrary command execution on the host the next time any device on the network requests a DHCP lease. The injected value is persisted to /etc/pihole/pihole.toml and survives restarts. The strncpy in the code path limits the total interface field to 31 bytes, but payloads such as wlan0\ndhcp-script=/tmp/p fit within this constraint. The dnsmasq config validation introduced in FTL 6.6 only checks syntactic validity, so valid directives injected via newline pass validation successfully. This issue has been fixed in version 6.6.1.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 8.7

Product Status

Vendor pi-hole
Product FTL
Versions
  • Version < 6.6.1 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-93: Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences ('CRLF Injection') CWE