CVE-2026-42512

High

Published: 30/04/2026(UTC)Translated: 15/06/2026(UTC)NVD NIST

Summary

CVE-2026-42512 affects dhclient, which incorrectly calculates the new size of the array of string pointers when resizing. This can lead to a heap buffer overrun, potentially resulting in a crash or allowing remote code execution.

Risk Assessment

Organizations may face service outages and potential remote code execution, posing a serious security threat to their systems.

Recommendation

It is recommended to update dhclient to the latest version to mitigate this vulnerability and to monitor systems for unauthorized activities.

Other vulnerabilities in dhclient

CVE-2026-42511High
The BOOTP file field is written to the lease file without escaping embedded double-quotes, allowing injection of arbitrary dhclient.conf directives. When the lease file is subsequently re-parsed by dhclient, a malicious field may be passed to dhclient-script(8), which evaluates it.

Original NVD description (English source)

As dhclient is building an environment to pass to dhclient-script, it may need to resize the array of string pointers. The code which expands the array incorrectly calculates its new size when requesting memory, resulting in a heap buffer overrun. A specially crafted packet can cause dhclient to overrun its buffer of environment entries. This can result in a crash, but it may be possible to leverage this bug to achieve remote code execution.