Cyber Resilience

CVE-2025-59529

DoS in Avahi ≤ 0.9

Public PoCDoS
Published
18 December 2025
Modified
16 January 2026
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 5.5
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0015 5th percentile
Risk Priority 35 floored blend · peak EPSS

Summary

CVE-2025-59529 is a medium-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Avahi Avahi. Its CVSS base score is 5.5 (Medium).

Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application Exhaustion Flood (T1499.003); ranked at the 5th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog; a public proof-of-concept is referenced.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to AC-10 (Concurrent Session Control) and SC-6 (Resource Availability) — see the control section below for these in your framework.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

Avahi is a system which facilitates service discovery on a local network via the mDNS/DNS-SD protocol suite. In versions up to and including 0.9-rc2, the simple protocol server ignores the documented client limit and accepts unlimited connections, allowing for easy…

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local DoS. Although `CLIENTS_MAX` is defined, `server_work()` unconditionally `accept()`s and `client_new()` always appends the new client and increments `n_clients`. There is no check against the limit. When client cannot be accepted as a result of maximal socket number of avahi-daemon, it logs unconditionally error per each connection. Unprivileged local users can exhaust daemon memory and file descriptors, causing a denial of service system-wide for mDNS/DNS-SD. Exhausting local file descriptors causes increased system load caused by logging errors of each of request. Overloading prevents glibc calls using nss-mdns plugins to resolve `*.local.` names and link-local addresses. As of time of publication, no known patched versions are available, but a candidate fix is available in pull request 808, and some workarounds are available. Simple clients are offered for nss-mdns package functionality. It is not possible to disable the unix socket `/run/avahi-daemon/socket`, but resolution requests received via DBus are not affected directly. Tools avahi-resolve, avahi-resolve-address and avahi-resolve-host-name are not affected, they use DBus interface. It is possible to change permissions of unix socket after avahi-daemon is started. But avahi-daemon does not provide any configuration for it. Additional access restrictions like SELinux can also prevent unwanted tools to access the socket and keep resolution working for trusted users.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI

T1499.003 Application Exhaustion Flood Impact
Adversaries may target resource intensive features of applications to cause a denial of service (DoS), denying availability to those applications.
Why these techniques?

Local resource exhaustion via unlimited client connections directly enables Application Exhaustion Flood (T1499.003).

Confidence: HIGH · MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise v19.0

CVEs Like This One

CVE-2026-34933Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2025-68471Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2025-68468Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2026-24401Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2025-68276Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2023-1981Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2023-38469Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2023-38471Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2023-38470Same product: Avahi Avahi
CVE-2023-38472Same product: Avahi Avahi

Affected Assets

avahi
avahi
0.9 · ≤ 0.9

Mitigating Controls

Control response

Prevent
Stop it (NIST 800-53)
  • AC-10 Concurrent Session Control
  • SC-6 Resource Availability
  • SC-5 Denial-of-service Protection
Detect
Catch it (NIST detect / respond)

Harden
Shrink the surface (DISA STIG)

Validate
Prove the fix (OWASP ASVS)

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI

prevent

Directly enforces a hard limit on concurrent client sessions, which the vulnerable server_work()/client_new() path fails to apply against CLIENTS_MAX.

prevent

Requires allocation of resources by quota or safeguard, preventing the unbounded file-descriptor and memory exhaustion that the missing limit check enables.

prevent

Mandates safeguards against denial-of-service via resource exhaustion on local IPC interfaces such as the avahi unix socket.

Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

PR.IR-04 mostly match
prevents

Explicitly requires monitoring and maintaining resource capacity, directly addressing uncontrolled consumption to preserve availability.

DE.CM-09 partial match
prevents

Continuous monitoring of computing resources can detect resource exhaustion but does not itself enforce allocation limits.

PR.IR-03 partial match
prevents

Resilience mechanisms such as avoiding single points of failure indirectly reduce impact of resource exhaustion.

PR.PS-01 partial match
prevents

Hardened configuration baselines can include resource quotas and limits that constrain consumption.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

detects

Resource-utilization monitoring and alerting on bottlenecks or overloads limits the impact of denial-of-service or resource-exhaustion attacks.

prevents

By continuously monitoring utilization, stress-testing peak loads, and maintaining documented plans to scale or throttle resources, the control directly limits an attacker’s ability to drive a system into uncontrolled resource exhaustion.

detects

Pre-agreed severity-based prioritization and resource allocation during incident triage reduce the likelihood that an attacker-induced resource exhaustion will overwhelm the organization before corrective action is taken.

mitigates

Business-continuity plans that include resource-management controls reduce the likelihood that an attacker can trigger uncontrolled resource consumption by forcing the system into a degraded or fallback state.

mitigates

Defining RTOs and capacity requirements for ICT services during business-impact analysis forces organizations to provision sufficient resources and throttling mechanisms, reducing the likelihood that an attacker can induce denial-of-service through uncontrolled resource consumption.

detects

Early notification of anomalous resource consumption or system malfunctions enables throttling or isolation before availability is lost.

References