CVE-2026-52738
MediumCVSS 6.9Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk30th percentile - higher than 30% of all known CVEs
Summary
ZEBRA prior to 4.5.0 can be permanently halted by a consensus-valid block containing a long chain of transparent self-spends. The credit-first ordering can cause the intermediate balance to exceed MAX_MONEY, leading to a panic in release builds. The block is accepted by zcashd, so the halt persists after restart.
Risk Assessment
The risk includes permanent halting of Zebra nodes, potentially leading to unavailability and synchronization issues.
Recommendation
Upgrade ZEBRA to version 4.5.0 or later and implement monitoring for unusual blocks.
Other vulnerabilities in ZEBRA
See all- CVE-2026-109366Low
Zebra before 6.4.0 contains an improper integrity validation vulnerability in the inbound gossip download path that allows unauthenticated peers to force dropping of new blocks without penalty. Attackers can serve a real block with a coinbase scriptSig rewritten to height 1, which keeps the ZIP-244 block hash, triggering a behind-tip drop before consensus validation and delaying tip discovery for mining backends.
- CVE-2026-104436Low
Zebra before 4.5.0 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability that allows remote P2P peers to exhaust blocking-pool threads by sending oversized block locator vectors. Attackers can send getblocks or getheaders messages with up to 65,535 locator hashes, triggering per-hash chain lookups that degrade block validation, RPC, and mempool performance.
- CVE-2026-104435High
Zebra zebrad 4.4.0 and zebra-script 6.0.0 fail to enforce a ZIP-244 consensus rule, accepting V5 transparent inputs signed with SIGHASH_SINGLE that lack a corresponding output. Attackers can broadcast crafted V5 transactions with more inputs than outputs that Zebra accepts but zcashd rejects, causing a network consensus split.
- CVE-2026-104434Medium
ZcashFoundation Zebra zebra-rpc before 8.0.0 and zebrad before 4.5.0 contain a reachable assertion in the z_listunifiedreceivers RPC handler, which calls expect() on Sapling receiver parsing that fails for Unified Addresses carrying invalid Jubjub points. Authenticated RPC clients can submit such an address to abort the zebrad process, repeatably keeping the node offline.
- CVE-2026-104431High
Zebra before 6.0.0 contains a denial of service vulnerability that allows unauthenticated peers to stall Tokio workers by submitting mempool transactions requiring expensive synchronous script verification. Attackers can send non-standard high-sigop P2SH transactions that reach CachedFfiTransaction::is_valid() before standardness checks, saturating the verifier buffer and rendering the node unresponsive.
- CVE-2026-104430High
Zebra zebrad 4.5.0 and zebra-script 7.0.0 count P2SH redeem script signature operations in legacy mode rather than zcashd's accurate P2SH mode, overcounting CHECKMULTISIG preceded by OP_1 through OP_16 as 20 sigops and causing a consensus divergence. Remote attackers can broadcast P2SH spends using low-threshold multisig redeem scripts so that a block zcashd accepts exceeds Zebra's inflated MAX_BLOCK_SIGOPS count, causing Zebra nodes to reject it and stall off the chain.
- CVE-2026-104429Medium
Zebra (zebrad) 5.0.0 before 6.0.0-rc.0 does not apply its per-peer mempool admission cap to transactions received as direct P2P tx messages, because these are queued without the sending peer recorded as their source. A remote inbound peer can push many unique transactions to occupy a disproportionate share of mempool admission slots, crowding out honest peers' transaction relay.
- CVE-2026-104426Medium
Zebra before 6.1.0 contains an inefficient algorithmic complexity vulnerability in remaining_transaction_value that clones the entire block-level spent-UTXO map per transaction during contextual verification. Attackers can mine or seed the mempool with roughly 26,000 minimal single-input transactions in one block, stalling every validating node for over 52 seconds.
- CVE-2026-104425Medium
ZcashFoundation Zebra before 6.1.0 contains a resource exhaustion vulnerability that allows unauthenticated peers to degrade block processing by pushing transactions with invalid Orchard proofs without being misbehavior-scored. Attackers can repeatedly push invalid proofs into the shared halo2 batch verifier, forcing honest block proofs onto the slow individual-verification path and slowing block processing roughly sevenfold.
- CVE-2026-104423High
Zebra (zebrad) before 6.2.1 contains an asymmetric resource consumption vulnerability that allows unauthenticated peers to stall block verification by pushing V6 mempool transactions with invalid Halo2 proofs. Attackers can flood the shared unprioritized Halo2 verification queue with zero-fee transactions carrying zero-filled Orchard and Ironwood proofs, causing nodes to fall behind the chain tip.
Original NVD description (English source)
ZEBRA is a Zcash node written entirely in Rust. Prior to 4.5.0, a consensus-valid block containing a long chain of transparent self-spends to one address can permanently halt Zebra nodes. In zebra-state/src/service/finalized_state/zebra_db/transparent.rs, the finalized-state writer originally applied every newly created output as a credit before applying any spent-output debit from the same block. That credit-first ordering can make the intermediate per-address balance exceed MAX_MONEY even though the final net balance is valid, causing an expect-based panic under the panic equals abort release profile. Because zcashd accepts the triggering block and Zebra encounters it again after every restart, the halt persists until patched software is deployed; exploitation requires mining the specially constructed block and temporarily committing sufficient ZEC to the self-spend chain. This issue is fixed in version 4.5.0.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

