CVE-2026-94453
Received
Received - Intake
Use-After-Free in Libreswan pluto Daemon
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-94453, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-10-13
Last updated on: 2026-10-13
Assigner: Libreswan Project
Description
Description
Libreswan's pluto daemon has a use-after-free vulnerability when a client connecting using IKE over TCP closes the connection and another packet (retransmit or malicious) is received for the same tuple. IKE state is retained in memory after the client closes the connection, storing a pointer to iface_endpoint inside ike_sa.sa->st_iface_endpoint. Once this invalid pointer is used, the daemon crashes and restarts. This vulnerability can be triggered before the remote peer has authenticated itself. Continued exploitation can lead to a denial of service. Remote code execution could be possible. The IKE over TCP option is not enabled by default; only configurations that contain listen-tcp=yes are affected.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| The | Libreswan | Project libreswan 4.0 |
| The | Libreswan | Project libreswan 5.4 |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-416 | The product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer. |
