Heap-based Buffer Overflow Affecting proftpd/proftpd package, versions [,1.3.9a)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.41% (34th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-PROFTPDPROFTPD-18017816
  • published19 Jul 2026
  • disclosed18 Jul 2026
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 18 Jul 2026

NewCVE-2026-53994  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-122  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade proftpd/proftpd to version 1.3.9a or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Heap-based Buffer Overflow in the fxp_packet_read function when processing attacker-supplied SFTP packet lengths without proper minimum sanity checks. An attacker can cause a heap buffer overflow by sending a specially crafted SFTP packet with a length of 0, leading to an unsigned integer underflow and size truncation, which results in writing attacker-controlled data beyond the allocated memory. This can allow crashing the per-connection session or potentially corrupting heap metadata by sending a malformed packet after authentication.

CVSS Base Scores

version 4.0
version 3.1