CVE-2018-16949 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2018-16949?

CVE-2018-16949 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 12 Sep 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

An issue was discovered in OpenAFS before 1.6.23 and 1.8.x before 1.8.2. Several data types used as RPC input variables were implemented as unbounded array types, limited only by the inherent 32-bit length field to 4 GB. An unauthenticated attacker could send, or claim to send, large input values and consume server resources waiting for those inputs, denying service to other valid connections.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-16949?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Openafs Openafs.

How do I fix CVE-2018-16949?

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-2018-16949 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-16949 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-16949, GHSA-2x26-cf8j-qvpf, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-16949.