CVE-2026-16599

Denial of Service in GNU wget

MEDIUM
5.1
CVSS Score
Published: August 25, 2026 at 02:17 PM UTC
Updated: August 28, 2026 at 03:42 PM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorWget

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Severity
MEDIUM5.1
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.4%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

GNU wget is vulnerable to denial of service in its FTP OPIE/S-KEY authentication functionality. The server-supplied sequence number from the FTP challenge line is used as an iteration count for an MD5 key-derivation loop without any upper bound validation. A malicious FTP server or a network attacker positioned to intercept FTP traffic can send a crafted OPIE challenge with a sequence number near INT_MAX, causing wget to perform up to approximately 2.1 billion MD5 computations and suspend for some time. The --timeout option does not mitigate this because it applies only to network I/O, not CPU computation. This issue was fixed in commit e9697d98e7249b0f68a6be040a4f3dcc5bc101fa

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

v ≤ 1.25.0

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitNot automatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

5.1MEDIUMCERT-PL
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusDEFERRED
CWE
CWE-606

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