What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-16301

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2019-10-03 · updated 2026-10-08
• Weakness: CWE-190

Description

The command-line argument parser in tcpdump before 4.99.0 has a buffer overflow in tcpdump.c:read_infile(). To trigger this vulnerability the attacker needs to create a 4GB file on the local filesystem and to specify the file name as the value of the -F command-line argument of tcpdump.

Affected products

• The Tcpdump Group tcpdump: before 4.99.0 — fixed in 4.99.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: The Tcpdump Group tcpdump 4.99.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/tcpdump/commit/ad7c25bc0decf96dc7768c9e903734d38528b1bd
• https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/tcpdump/commit/ad7c25bc0decf96dc7768c9e903734d38528b1bd

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