CVE-2026-0517
Published: 17 January 2026
Summary
CVE-2026-0517 is a medium-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Absolute Secure Access. Its CVSS base score is 6.0 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004); ranked at the 10.3th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 SC-5 (Denial-of-service Protection) and SI-10 (Information Input Validation).
Deeper analysis
CVE-2026-0517 is a denial-of-service vulnerability affecting versions of Secure Access Server prior to 14.20. The flaw, classified under CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption), allows an attacker to send a specially crafted packet to the server, triggering a crash. It has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.5 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H), indicating high severity due to its potential for significant availability impact without requiring authentication or user interaction.
A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability over the network with low complexity by transmitting the malicious packet to a vulnerable Secure Access Server instance. Successful exploitation results in a server crash, disrupting service availability and potentially causing downtime for dependent users or systems until the server is restarted.
The primary advisory is available from Absolute at https://www.absolute.com/platform/security-information/vulnerability-archive/cve-2026-0517, which provides further details on the issue published on 2026-01-17. Practitioners should consult this reference for specific mitigation guidance, such as upgrading to version 14.20 or later.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2026-3162
Vulnerability details
CVE-2026-0517 is a denial-of-service vulnerability in versions of Secure Access Server prior to 14.20. An attacker can send a specially crafted packet to a server and cause the server to crash
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Directly enables Endpoint DoS via crafted packet exploiting uncontrolled resource consumption to crash the server (T1499.004 Application or System Exploitation).
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Requires timely remediation of flaws, directly addressing this CVE by patching Secure Access Server to version 14.20 or later to prevent crafted packet crashes.
Implements denial-of-service protections to block or mitigate specially crafted packets that cause server crashes as in this vulnerability.
Mandates validation of information inputs, preventing processing of malformed packets that trigger uncontrolled resource consumption and server crashes in this CVE.