What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-52733: ZEBRA: Persistent on-disk corruption of Sapling/Orchard subtree roots after chain fork via pop_tip

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 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: 2026-08-18 · updated 2026-09-09
• Weakness: CWE-459

Description

ZEBRA is a Zcash node written entirely in Rust. Prior to 4.5.0, a natural or attacker-influenced chain fork can leave stale Sapling and Orchard note-commitment subtree roots in Zebra state. In zebra-state/src/service/non_finalized_state/chain.rs, Chain::pop_tip removed a reverted tip block but did not remove subtree entries whose end_height belonged to that block, unlike the cleanup performed by pop_root. When the winning fork later finalized, the abandoned branch's stale subtree data could be written to RocksDB and survive node restarts. The corrupted history can cause z_getsubtreesbyindex consumers such as lightwalletd and light wallets to receive incorrect subtree roots, producing wallet synchronization failures or incorrect wallet state and requiring a full state rebuild for recovery. This issue is fixed in version 4.5.0.

Affected products

• ZcashFoundation zebra-state: before 7.0.0
• ZcashFoundation zebra: before 4.5.0

References

• https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra/commit/1440b43ca7df59aca948090d45117557b217a6cd
• https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra/releases/tag/v4.5.0
• https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra/security/advisories/GHSA-2gf8-q9rr-jq3h

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