CVE-2016-6254

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.1 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 5.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2016-08-19 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-119

Description

Heap-based buffer overflow in the parse_packet function in network.c in collectd before 5.4.3 and 5.x before 5.5.2 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted network packet.

Affected products

Collectd: from 5.4.0 before 5.4.3; from 5.5.0 before 5.5.2 — fixed in 5.4.3, 5.5.2
Debian Linux: 8.0
Fedoraproject Fedora: 23, 24

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Collectd 5.4.3, 5.5.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://collectd.org/news.shtml
http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3636
https://github.com/collectd/collectd/commit/b589096f907052b3a4da2b9ccc9b0e2e888dfc18
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/CM4W5SJ4OTBGINGIN4NJLXCUZAZANO6J/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/UIZ5UXDOB7BA5NGE2F2I2BL4K6763DHW/
http://collectd.org/news.shtml
http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3636
https://github.com/collectd/collectd/commit/b589096f907052b3a4da2b9ccc9b0e2e888dfc18
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/CM4W5SJ4OTBGINGIN4NJLXCUZAZANO6J/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/UIZ5UXDOB7BA5NGE2F2I2BL4K6763DHW/

Get alerted when CVE-2016-6254 or the next vulnerability affects your stack