sharkd Denial of Service Vulnerability

Compliance Impact

The provided information does not specify any direct impact of the CVE-2026-7378 vulnerability on compliance with common standards and regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.

Useful 0 Not Useful 0

Executive Summary

The CVE-2026-7378 vulnerability affects the Wireshark Sharkd utility, causing it to crash due to a heap-buffer-overflow issue. This happens when sharkd uses a cached filter bitmap from a previously loaded capture file that is smaller than the frame count of a newly loaded capture. Because the cache is never invalidated, a read operation can go beyond the allocated memory, leading to a crash.

The affected versions are Wireshark Sharkd 4.6.0 to 4.6.4 and 4.4.0 to 4.4.14. The vulnerability can be triggered by providing a specially crafted input file to sharkd.

Useful 0 Not Useful 0

Impact Analysis

This vulnerability can cause a denial of service by crashing the sharkd utility when it processes certain input files. While there are no known exploits in the wild, an attacker could potentially trigger a crash by supplying a specially crafted capture file, disrupting network analysis or monitoring activities that rely on sharkd.

Useful 0 Not Useful 0

Detection Guidance

There are no specific detection commands or network/system detection methods provided for this vulnerability in the available resources.

The vulnerability is triggered by providing a specially crafted input file to the sharkd utility, which causes a heap-buffer-overflow and crash.

Detection would likely involve monitoring for crashes or abnormal behavior in the sharkd process when processing capture files.

Useful 0 Not Useful 0

Mitigation Strategies

The recommended immediate mitigation step is to upgrade the Wireshark sharkd utility to version 4.6.5, 4.4.15, or later.

Upgrading will address the heap-buffer-overflow vulnerability and prevent potential denial of service caused by crashes.

Useful 0 Not Useful 0