What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-57224: Suricata dhcp: unbounded transactions in unidirectional traffic can lead to resource exhaustion

• 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: 2026-09-18 · updated 2026-09-28
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

Suricata is a network Intrusion Detection System, Intrusion Prevention System and Network Security Monitoring engine. From 8.0.0 until 8.0.6, the DHCP parser in rust/src/dhcp/dhcp.rs creates stateless transactions without recording their packet direction with AppLayerTxData::for_direction(), so a sensor that observes only one direction cannot mark the unseen direction inspected or free completed transactions. The RDP parser in rust/src/rdp/rdp.rs has the same direction-state defect. The per-flow transaction list can grow without bound and cleanup repeatedly scans it, causing increasing CPU and memory consumption and eventual denial of service. This issue is fixed in version 8.0.6.

Affected products

• OISF suricata: from 8.0.0 before 8.0.6 — fixed in 8.0.6

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: OISF suricata 8.0.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/OISF/suricata/commit/3f86c56c800392ede5cfaf7a944a431fd8445c55
• https://github.com/OISF/suricata/commit/5af13e3eb06be0387da8703b611c5ce932245c59
• https://github.com/OISF/suricata/commit/bac8a69ca48c14582d39a244a87edad44751ebe1
• https://github.com/OISF/suricata/commit/ef035c7603293a10c5ad087e3d20b05f75236144
• https://github.com/OISF/suricata/pull/15740
• https://github.com/OISF/suricata/releases/tag/suricata-8.0.6
• https://github.com/OISF/suricata/security/advisories/GHSA-m2vc-g65c-ph7m
• https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/issues/8621

Get alerted when CVE-2026-57224 or the next vulnerability affects your stack