FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

FreeBSD -- TCP: remotely exploitable DoS vector (mbuf leak)

Affected packages
15.0 <= FreeBSD-kernel < 15.0_5
14.4 <= FreeBSD-kernel < 14.4_1
14.3 <= FreeBSD-kernel < 14.3_10

Details

VuXML ID 7aa913e9-28d1-11f1-b35e-bc241121aa0a
Discovery 2026-03-25
Entry 2026-03-26

Problem Description:

When a challenge ACK is to be sent tcp_respond() constructs and sends the challenge ACK and consumes the mbuf that is passed in. When no challenge ACK should be sent the function returns and leaks the mbuf.

Impact:

If an attacker is either on path with an established TCP connection, or can themselves establish a TCP connection, to an affected FreeBSD machine, they can easily craft and send packets which meet the challenge ACK criteria and cause the FreeBSD host to leak an mbuf for each crafted packet in excess of the configured rate limit settings i.e. with default settings, crafted packets in excess of the first 5 sent within a 1s period will leak an mbuf.

Technically, off-path attackers can also exploit this problem by guessing the IP addresses, TCP port numbers and in some cases the sequence numbers of established connections and spoofing packets towards a FreeBSD machine, but this is harder to do effectively.

References

CVE Name CVE-2026-4247
FreeBSD Advisory SA-26:06.tcp