Vulnerability · Published Aug 18, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-52738ZEBRA: Finalized address balance credit-first overflow on consensus-valid blocks
Medium 6.9
In plain English
A medium-severity security flaw in zebra from ZcashFoundation. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.5% (higher than 43% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
ZEBRA is a Zcash node written entirely in Rust. Prior to 4.5.0, a consensus-valid block containing a long chain of transparent self-spends to one address can permanently halt Zebra nodes. In zebra-state/src/service/finalized_state/zebra_db/transparent.rs, the finalized-state writer originally applied every newly created output as a credit before applying any spent-output debit from the same block. That credit-first ordering can make the intermediate per-address balance exceed MAX_MONEY even though the final net balance is valid, causing an expect-based panic under the panic equals abort release profile. Because zcashd accepts the triggering block and Zebra encounters it again after every restart, the halt persists until patched software is deployed; exploitation requires mining the specially constructed block and temporarily committing sufficient ZEC to the self-spend chain. This issue is fixed in version 4.5.0.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| ZcashFoundation | zebra | < 4.5.0 |
| ZcashFoundation | zebra-state | < 7.0.0 |
Weakness: CWE-248 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N