CVE-2026-81334: darknet through 6.0 Out-of-Bounds Read and Write via Unchecked Layer Index in .cfg Parser

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.1 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-08-27 · updated 2026-09-24
Weakness: CWE-125

Description

darknet subscripts its layer array with an index taken from a configuration file without checking it against the array's length. The array is allocated in src-lib/darknet_network.cpp as xcalloc(net.n, sizeof(Darknet::Layer)), sized to exactly the number of layer sections the file declares. The shortcut, scale_channels and sam sections supply that index through their from field and the route section through its layers field, and parse_shortcut_section in src-lib/darknet_cfg.cpp reads net.layers[index].outputs with no bounds check, which reads past the allocation. The dispatch loop in create_network then reuses the same index to assign net.layers[l.index].use_bin_output and net.layers[l.index].keep_delta_gpu, writing past the allocation at an offset the file controls, with a fixed one-byte value. Parsing a crafted configuration file is sufficient: the parse runs before any weights file is opened and needs no non-default option, so the result is a reliable crash and a write whose location, though not its value, is chosen by whoever supplied the file.

Affected products

hank-ai darknet: through 6.0

References

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