What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-26076: ntpd-rs affected by excessive CPU load from malformed packets

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-02-12 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-770

Description

ntpd-rs is a full-featured implementation of the Network Time Protocol. Prior to 1.7.1, an attacker can remotely induce moderate increases (2-4 times above normal) in cpu usage. When having NTS enabled on an ntpd-rs server, an attacker can create malformed NTS packets that take significantly more effort for the server to respond to by requesting a large number of cookies. This can lead to degraded server performance even when a server could otherwise handle the load. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.7.1.

Affected products

• pendulum-project ntpd-rs: before 1.7.1 — fixed in 1.7.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: pendulum-project ntpd-rs 1.7.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/pendulum-project/ntpd-rs/commit/fa73af14d17b666b1142b9fee3ba22c18a841d24
• https://github.com/pendulum-project/ntpd-rs/releases/tag/v1.7.1
• https://github.com/pendulum-project/ntpd-rs/security/advisories/GHSA-c7j7-rmvr-fjmv

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