Medium [CVE-2026-16599] Denial of Service via crafted FTP OPIE/S-KEY authentication challenge
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-16599 affecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
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Summary
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 This challenge contains a sequence number that, when processed by wget, can lead to an excessive number of cryptographic computations. This prolonged computation can cause wget to become unresponsive, resulting in a denial of service.
All versions of wget as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System, and Fedora are affected. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 6.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).
Weakness: CWE-835. Red Hat does not currently list a fixing RHSA for this CVE.
Affected products named by the advisory: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8; and 2 more.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 2 hours ago·verify at source
Fixed versions
No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 2 hours ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 2 hours ago·verify at source
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