Vulnerability · Published May 8, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2026-44500ZEBRA: Allocation Amplification in Inbound Network Deserializers

Medium 5.3

In plain English

A medium-severity resource allocation without limits 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 0.4% (higher than 30% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)5.3Medium

Exploit odds (30 days)0.4%top 69.8% of all CVEs

Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none

Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

ZEBRA is a Zcash node written entirely in Rust. Prior to zebrad version 4.4.0, prior to zebra-chain version 7.0.0, and prior to zebra-network version 6.0.0, several inbound deserialization paths in Zebra allocated buffers sized against generic transport or block-size ceilings before the tighter protocol or consensus limits were enforced. An unauthenticated or post-handshake peer could therefore force the node to preallocate and parse for orders of magnitude more data than the protocol intended, across headers messages, equihash solutions in block headers, Sapling spend vectors in V5/V4 transactions, and coinbase script bytes in blocks. This issue has been patched in zebrad version 4.4.0, zebra-chain version 7.0.0, and zebra-network version 6.0.0.

Affected products (as reported)

Vendor	Product	Versions
ZcashFoundation	zebra	zebrad < 4.4.0zebra-chain < 7.0.0zebra-network < 6.0.0

Weakness: CWE-770 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

References

https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra/security/advisories/GHSA-438q-jx8f-cccv x_refsource_CONFIRM