CVE-2026-66035
NVD analysis in progress
libssh2 through 1.11.1, fixed in commit 42e33d8, contains a pre-authentication heap buffer overflow vulnerability that allows a malicious SSH server to corrupt heap metadata in any connecting client by sending a packet with a packet_length smaller than the cipher's block size during Encrypt-then-MAC cipher negotiation. In the fullpacket() function in src/transport.c, the ETM path allocates a buffer of packet_length bytes but copies blocksize minus one bytes via memcpy, causing an overflow that on 32-bit glibc writes attacker-controlled bytes into an adjacent chunk's SIZE field, enabling tcache bin confusion, overlapping live objects, and function pointer overwrite during the session handshake before authentication.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network and without authentication — but only if a user opens booby-trapped content. The attack does require particular conditions, which makes it less systematic.
- Impact
- An attacker can read sensitive data, modify or destroy data and take the service offline.
- Weakness
- A heap overflow corrupts allocator structures and can lead to code execution.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doFold into the next patch cycle.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.