What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-8006: NULL pointer dereference in libpcap before 1.10.5 with remote packet capture support

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.4 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2024-08-31 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

Remote packet capture support is disabled by default in libpcap. When a user builds libpcap with remote packet capture support enabled, one of the functions that become available is pcap_findalldevs_ex(). One of the function arguments can be a filesystem path, which normally means a directory with input data files. When the specified path cannot be used as a directory, the function receives NULL from opendir(), but does not check the return value and passes the NULL value to readdir(), which causes a NULL pointer derefence.

Affected products

• The Tcpdump Group libpcap: before 1.10.5 — fixed in 1.10.5

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: The Tcpdump Group libpcap 1.10.5. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/libpcap/commit/0f8a103469ce87d2b8d68c5130a46ddb7fb5eb29
• https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/libpcap/commit/8a633ee5b9ecd9d38a587ac9b204e2380713b0d6

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