What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2022-39028
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 2.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: yes
- Published: 2022-08-30 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-476
Description
telnetd in GNU Inetutils through 2.3, MIT krb5-appl through 1.0.3, and derivative works has a NULL pointer dereference via 0xff 0xf7 or 0xff 0xf8. In a typical installation, the telnetd application would crash but the telnet service would remain available through inetd. However, if the telnetd application has many crashes within a short time interval, the telnet service would become unavailable after inetd logs a "telnet/tcp server failing (looping), service terminated" error. NOTE: MIT krb5-appl is not supported upstream but is shipped by a few Linux distributions. The affected code was removed from the supported MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) product many years ago, at version 1.8.
Affected products
- Debian Linux: 10.0
- GNU inetutils: through 2.3
- MIT Kerberos 5: through 1.0.3
- Netkit-Telnet Project Netkit-Telnet: through 0.17
References
- https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/pkgs/inetutils.git/commit/?id=113da8021710d871c7dd72d2a4d5615d42d64289
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/11/msg00033.html
- https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2022-08/msg00002.html
- https://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2022-08-24-2-byte-dos-freebsd-netbsd-telnetd-netkit-telnetd-inetutils-telnetd-kerberos-telnetd.html
- https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/pkgs/inetutils.git/commit/?id=113da8021710d871c7dd72d2a4d5615d42d64289
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/11/msg00033.html
- https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2022-08/msg00002.html
- https://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2022-08-24-2-byte-dos-freebsd-netbsd-telnetd-netkit-telnetd-inetutils-telnetd-kerberos-telnetd.html
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