CVE-2016-6261 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2016-6261?

CVE-2016-6261 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 7 Sep 2016. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The idna_to_ascii_4i function in lib/idna.c in libidn before 1.33 allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read and crash) via 64 bytes of input.

Weakness: CWE-125

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-6261?

It affects 3 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Gnu Libidn, Opensuse Leap.

How do I fix CVE-2016-6261?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2016-6261 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-6261 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as ALPINE-CVE-2016-6261, DEBIAN-CVE-2016-6261, GHSA-hr7q-x7xm-q959, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-6261.