CVE-2026-71540: Wazuh Manager cluster header parsing allows pre-authentication memory exhaustion

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: 2026-09-24 · updated 2026-09-30
Weakness: CWE-770

Description

Wazuh is an open-source security platform providing unified XDR and SIEM protection for endpoints and cloud workloads. From 3.9.0 until 4.14.7, wazuh-clusterd in framework/wazuh/core/cluster/common.py allocates a payload buffer using the size declared in a 20-byte cluster protocol header before Fernet decryption validates the peer. An unauthenticated network peer can declare a payload of up to 256 MiB, stop sending after the header, and retain that allocation until the TCP connection closes. The cluster listener has no application-level per-source connection budget in affected versions, allowing concurrent sockets to multiply memory consumption and potentially terminate the cluster process, disrupt synchronization, and interrupt distributed API forwarding. This issue is fixed in version 4.14.7.

Affected products

wazuh: from 3.9.0, < 4.14.7

References

Get alerted when CVE-2026-71540 or the next vulnerability affects your stack