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Wireshark disclosed CVE-2026-76919, a flaw in its ESS protocol dissector that can crash the application when it processes malformed BER BIT STRING data. The bug stems from generated ESS dissector code that can pass an uninitialized tvbuff_t * pointer into attribute-flag post-processing after BER decoding paths return without assigning it; a crafted zero-length BIT STRING such as:
03 00
can trigger a dissector exception, abort, crash, or unsafe native memory access in Wireshark or TShark.
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4 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
On 2026-08-12, Wireshark published security notice wnpa-sec-2026-86 for an ESS protocol dissector crash vulnerability affecting versions 4.6.0 through 4.6.7 and 4.4.0 through 4.4.17. The advisory credited Aisle Research, O2Lab, and Texas A&M University researchers and said Wireshark was unaware of any exploits.
Wireshark said the ESS dissector crash vulnerability was fixed in versions 4.6.8 and 4.4.18, and advised users to upgrade to those releases or later. The flaw could be triggered by malformed network traffic or a crafted capture file.
The GitLab issue states the vulnerability was fixed and closed through merged merge requests and commit affa11c6. The remediation initializes the attributes pointer to NULL and only calls ess_dissect_attribute_flags() when BER decoding produced a valid TVB.
A GitLab issue documented CVE-2026-76919, a flaw in Wireshark's ESS dissector where malformed BER BIT STRING data could cause an uninitialized tvbuff_t pointer to be used during attribute-flag dissection. The issue states it was reported by AISLE Security and includes technical details and a proposed fix.
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Wireshark disclosed a high-severity flaw in its Kerberos protocol dissector that can crash **Wireshark** or **TShark** when processing malformed traffic or packet captures. The bug, tracked as `CVE-2026-76924` and documented in advisory `wnpa-sec-2026-78`, stems from an out-of-bounds read while formatting a preview of a learned `EncryptionKey` from plaintext Kerberos credential data. Researchers reported that a crafted `EncKrbCredPart`, including traffic delivered over UDP/88, could trigger a heap-buffer-overflow even without a valid keytab, valid key, or successful decryption. The vendor said the issue affects Wireshark versions **4.6.0 through 4.6.7** and **4.4.0 through 4.4.17**, and it has been fixed in **4.6.8** and **4.4.18**. The root cause was that the dissector copied bounded key bytes into retained storage but still read four bytes from the original input buffer, allowing one- to three-byte keys to cause the crash; the fix reformats the preview from a zero-initialized retained buffer after the bounded copy. Wireshark said malformed packets injected onto a network or malicious packet capture files could trigger the vulnerability, and no active exploits are known.
Aug 21, 2026
Wireshark disclosed **CVE-2026-3203**, a crash vulnerability in its RF4CE Profile dissector that can be triggered by malformed RF4CE/ZigBee traffic or a crafted packet capture file. The issue was uncovered during internal fuzz testing, which found that `tshark` on the `release-4.6` branch could hit a segmentation fault while processing a crafted capture derived from an RF4CE example file. AddressSanitizer traced the invalid read to RF4CE and ZigBee decryption code, including `zbee_sec_ccm_decrypt` in `packet-zbee-security.c` and related RF4CE dissector paths.
Aug 21, 2026
Wireshark disclosed **CVE-2026-5653**, a heap-based buffer overflow in its DCP-ETSI protocol dissector that can crash the network protocol analyzer and cause a denial of service. The flaw affects Wireshark versions `4.6.0` through `4.6.4` and `4.4.0` through `4.4.14`, and was assigned **CWE-122** with a **CVSS v3.1 score of 5.5**. According to the advisory, an attacker could trigger the issue by injecting a malformed packet onto the network or by convincing a user to open a crafted packet capture file. Wireshark fixed the vulnerability in versions `4.6.5` and `4.4.15`; the issue was discovered by Alexandre de Oliveira, and the vendor said no active exploits were known at the time of disclosure.
Aug 21, 2026