CVE-2026-3497
Published: 12 March 2026
Summary
CVE-2026-3497 is a medium-severity Use of Uninitialized Resource (CWE-908) vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux. Its CVSS base score is 6.9 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190); ranked in the top 22.2% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2026-11684
Vulnerability details
Vulnerability in the OpenSSH GSSAPI delta included in various Linux distributions. This vulnerability affects the GSSAPI patches added by various Linux distributions and does not affect the OpenSSH upstream project itself. The usage of sshpkt_disconnect() on an error, which does…
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not terminate the process, allows an attacker to send an unexpected GSSAPI message type during the GSSAPI key exchange to the server, which will call the underlying function and continue the execution of the program without setting the related connection variables. As the variables are not initialized to NULL the code later accesses those uninitialized variables, accessing random memory, which could lead to undefined behavior. The recommended workaround is to use ssh_packet_disconnect() instead, which does terminate the process. The impact of the vulnerability depends heavily on the compiler flag hardening configuration.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Remote unauthenticated exploit against public-facing SSH service during GSSAPI key exchange, enabling initial access or remote service exploitation via memory corruption/UB.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
No mitigating controls mapped yet. The per-CVE control annotator has not reached this CVE.