Protocol Dissector Infinite Loop in Wireshark

Executive Summary

This vulnerability involves multiple protocol dissectors in Wireshark versions 4.6.0 to 4.6.6 and 4.4.0 to 4.4.16 that can enter infinite loops.

These infinite loops occur during the processing of certain network protocols, which can cause the application to become unresponsive.

The issue allows an attacker to cause a denial of service by exploiting these infinite loops.

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Impact Analysis

The primary impact of this vulnerability is denial of service.

An attacker could exploit the infinite loops in Wireshark's protocol dissectors to cause the application to hang or crash, disrupting network analysis activities.

Since the vulnerability requires local access (AV:L) and user interaction (UI:R), the risk is somewhat limited to users running the affected versions of Wireshark.

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Mitigation Strategies

The primary immediate mitigation step is to upgrade Wireshark to a fixed version.

• Upgrade affected Wireshark installations from versions 4.6.0 to 4.6.6 or 4.4.0 to 4.4.16 to versions 4.6.7 or 4.4.17 (or later).

Avoid opening untrusted or suspicious capture files that could contain malformed packets designed to trigger the vulnerability.

Monitor system resource usage when analyzing capture files and terminate Wireshark if excessive CPU consumption is detected.

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Compliance Impact

The vulnerability in Wireshark (CVE-2026-15163) causes multiple protocol dissectors to enter infinite loops, leading to denial of service through excessive CPU consumption. However, there is no information in the provided context or resources indicating any direct impact on data confidentiality, integrity, or privacy that would affect compliance with standards such as GDPR or HIPAA.

Since the vulnerability primarily results in denial of service and does not involve unauthorized data access or leakage, it does not directly compromise compliance with regulations focused on data protection and privacy.

Organizations using affected Wireshark versions should upgrade to patched versions (4.6.7 or 4.4.17 and later) to mitigate denial of service risks, but no compliance-specific impacts are described.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability involves multiple protocol dissectors in Wireshark entering infinite loops when processing malformed packets, which can cause denial of service by excessive CPU consumption.

Detection can be approached by monitoring for unusual CPU usage spikes when analyzing network capture files with affected Wireshark versions (4.6.0 to 4.6.6 and 4.4.0 to 4.4.16).

Fuzz testing with AddressSanitizer (ASan) builds has been used to identify these issues by processing crafted capture files that trigger dissector failures and infinite loops.

• Use Wireshark with ASan enabled to run fuzz tests on suspicious capture files.
• Monitor CPU usage during packet analysis for spikes indicating infinite loops.
• Check logs or error messages related to dissector failures or warnings about invalid packet data (e.g., invalid nanosecond timestamps, truncated SDNV decoding).

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