CVE-2026-73500
NVD analysis in progress
etcd is a distributed key-value store for the data of a distributed system. Prior to versions 3.5.33, 3.6.14, and 3.7.1, a network attacker who can reach an etcd TLS listener can open many TCP connections and never send a ClientHello. In client/pkg/transport/listener_tls.go, each connection handled by tlsListener.acceptLoop spawns a goroutine that blocks indefinitely inside tls.Conn.Handshake() and remains tracked in the pending map. Unbounded goroutine and map growth can exhaust memory in the etcd process, causing loss of availability for the cluster and, when etcd backs Kubernetes, the control plane. This issue is fixed in versions 3.5.33, 3.6.14, and 3.7.1.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can take the service offline.
- Weakness
- Resources are allocated without a cap, so simple repetition is enough to exhaust them.
- 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. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.