What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-44500: ZEBRA: Allocation Amplification in Inbound Network Deserializers
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 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: yes
- Published: 2026-05-08 · updated 2026-10-26
- Weakness: CWE-770
Description
ZEBRA is a Zcash node written entirely in Rust. Prior to zebrad version 4.4.0, prior to zebra-chain version 7.0.0, and prior to zebra-network version 6.0.0, several inbound deserialization paths in Zebra allocated buffers sized against generic transport or block-size ceilings before the tighter protocol or consensus limits were enforced. An unauthenticated or post-handshake peer could therefore force the node to preallocate and parse for orders of magnitude more data than the protocol intended, across headers messages, equihash solutions in block headers, Sapling spend vectors in V5/V4 transactions, and coinbase script bytes in blocks. This issue has been patched in zebrad version 4.4.0, zebra-chain version 7.0.0, and zebra-network version 6.0.0.
Affected products
- ZcashFoundation zebra-chain: before 7.0.0 — fixed in 7.0.0
- ZcashFoundation zebra-network: before 6.0.0 — fixed in 6.0.0
- ZcashFoundation zebra: before 4.4.0 — fixed in 4.4.0
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: ZcashFoundation zebra-chain 7.0.0; ZcashFoundation zebra-network 6.0.0; ZcashFoundation zebra 4.4.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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