CVE-2026-15972 Unauthenticated denial of service via unbounded external gRPC connection acceptance
Remote attackers can cause denial of service by exhausting resources via unbounded gRPC connections, affecting Consul deployments.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-15972?
CVE-2026-15972 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in HashiCorp Consul, published on 7 Aug 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Consul Community Edition and Consul Enterprise 1.13.0 through 2.0.2 are vulnerable to an unauthenticated denial of service through unbounded connection acceptance on the external gRPC listeners. A remote attacker may exhaust agent file descriptors, goroutines, and memory by opening many incomplete connections, potentially preventing legitimate clients from connecting. This vulnerability, CVE-2026-15972, is fixed in Consul 2.0.3 and Consul Enterprise 1.21.17, 1.22.11, and 2.0.3.
Weakness: CWE-770
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-15972?
1 open source package ship an affected version, including consul.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
consul Bitnami | From 1.13.0 | 2.0.3 |
How do I fix CVE-2026-15972?
Upgrade consul to 2.0.3 or later.
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-2026-15972 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-15972 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as BIT-consul-2026-15972, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-15972, GHSA-699f-92f5-m297, MINI-5794-jgf3-76ww, MINI-gw4h-v626-gx47, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-15972.