CVE-2026-52738 ZEBRA: Finalized address balance credit-first overflow on consensus-valid blocks

What is CVE-2026-52738?

CVE-2026-52738 is a medium-severity vulnerability in ZcashFoundation zebra, published on 18 Aug 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

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.

Weakness: CWE-248

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-52738?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including zebra-state and zebrad.

How do I fix CVE-2026-52738?

Upgrade zebra-state to 7.0.0 or later.

Is CVE-2026-52738 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-52738 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

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

Also known as GHSA-w834-cf6p-9m9w.