GNU wget is vulnerable to denial of service in its FTP OPIE/S-KEY authentication functionality. The server-supplied sequence number from the FTP challenge line is used as an iteration count for an MD5 key-derivation loop without any upper bound validation. A malicious FTP server or a network attacker positioned to intercept FTP traffic can send a crafted OPIE challenge with a sequence number near INT_MAX, causing wget to perform up to approximately 2.1 billion MD5 computations and suspend for some time. The --timeout option does not mitigate this because it applies only to network I/O, not CPU computation.


This issue was fixed in commit e9697d98e7249b0f68a6be040a4f3dcc5bc101fa
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Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:45:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description GNU wget is vulnerable to denial of service in its FTP OPIE/S-KEY authentication functionality. The server-supplied sequence number from the FTP challenge line is used as an iteration count for an MD5 key-derivation loop without any upper bound validation. A malicious FTP server or a network attacker positioned to intercept FTP traffic can send a crafted OPIE challenge with a sequence number near INT_MAX, causing wget to perform up to approximately 2.1 billion MD5 computations and suspend for some time. The --timeout option does not mitigate this because it applies only to network I/O, not CPU computation. This issue was fixed in commit e9697d98e7249b0f68a6be040a4f3dcc5bc101fa
Title Denial of Service in GNU wget
Weaknesses CWE-606
References
Metrics cvssV4_0

{'score': 5.1, 'vector': 'CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N'}


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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: CERT-PL

Published:

Updated: 2026-08-25T14:17:04.941Z

Reserved: 2026-07-22T14:11:18.939Z

Link: CVE-2026-16599

cve-icon Vulnrichment

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cve-icon NVD

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cve-icon Redhat

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cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

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Weaknesses