GHSA-4fc2-h7jh-287c CVE-2026-52732

zebrad has mempool transaction admission denial via single-peer inbound queue saturation

Medium crates.io

Severity: 5.3 / 10; Medium · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS): 0.51%; Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 43.26% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited: No; Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness: CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Fix: 4.5.0; Upgrade zebrad to this version or later

Description

Am I affected

You are affected if:

You run zebrad up to and including v4.4.1.
Your node accepts inbound P2P connections (network.listen_addr is set, which is the default).
Your node's mempool is active (node is synced near the chain tip).

All default configurations are affected.

Summary

A single unauthenticated P2P peer can monopolize all 25 inbound mempool download/verification slots (MAX_INBOUND_CONCURRENCY) by advertising fake transaction IDs. While the slots are occupied, all other inbound transactions from honest peers and local RPC sendrawtransaction calls are rejected with MempoolError::FullQueue. The attacker peer is never scored for misbehavior and is not disconnected, allowing sustained denial of mempool admission.

Details

The mempool download/verification pipeline at zebrad/src/components/mempool/downloads.rs uses a single bounded pool of 25 concurrent tasks. Three architectural gaps combine to produce the vulnerability:

No per-peer accounting: the 25 slots are shared across all peers with no cap on how many a single peer can hold.
No overload signaling: when FullQueue is returned, the inbound service at zebrad/src/components/inbound.rs maps it to Response::Nil, hiding the overload from the peer connection layer. The existing handle_inbound_overload disconnection logic never fires.
No misbehavior attribution: peer identity is not carried through the Gossip type into the download pipeline, so verification failures cannot be attributed to the originating peer.

The attacker sends inv messages advertising fake transaction IDs. Zebra queues download tasks for each ID. The attacker stays silent; each slot is held until the TRANSACTION_DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT (20 seconds) fires. The attacker periodically sends fresh inv waves to re-fill slots as they expire.

Two additional slot-holding techniques have been independently demonstrated: invalid-prevout transactions that park in AwaitOutput for 60 seconds, and expensive shielded proof verification with auth-variant cache bypass. All three techniques are addressed by the same per-peer accounting fix.

Patches

zebrad 4.5.0

The fix adds per-peer queue accounting to the mempool download pipeline. A single peer is limited to a fraction of MAX_INBOUND_CONCURRENCY (e.g., 5 slots out of 25). FullQueue is surfaced as an overload signal to the peer connection layer. Peer identity is plumbed through the Gossip type for misbehavior attribution.

Workarounds

There is no complete configuration-level workaround. Reducing network.peerset_initial_target_size limits the total inbound peer count but does not prevent a single peer from holding all mempool slots.

Impact

Mempool transaction admission is denied for all honest peers and local RPC clients while the attack is sustained. Block validation and chain synchronization continue normally. The attacker needs only one TCP connection and minimal bandwidth (~1 KB/s of fake inv messages). The node recovers immediately when the attacker stops. This does not affect consensus, funds, or on-disk state.

Credit

Reported by @dingledropper via a private GitHub Security Advisory submission.

Affected versions

crates.io

Package	Vulnerable	Fixed in
zebrad	`< 4.5.0`	`4.5.0`

How to fix

Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.

zebrad crates.io → `4.5.0`

cargo

cargo update -p zebrad --precise 4.5.0

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.1 5.3

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Attack vector: Network
Attack complexity: Low
Privileges required: None
User interaction: None
Scope: Unchanged
Confidentiality: None
Integrity: None
Availability: Low

Weakness

CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

The product allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any intended restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated.

How to prevent it

Requirements: Clearly specify the minimum and maximum expectations for capabilities, and dictate which behaviors are acceptable when resource allocation reaches limits.
Architecture and Design: Limit the amount of resources that are accessible to unprivileged users. Set per-user limits for resources. Allow the system administrator to define these limits. Be careful to avoid CWE-410.
Architecture and Design: Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place, and it will help the administrator to identify who is committing the abuse. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
Implementation: Assume all input is malicious. Use an "accept known good" input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does. When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, "boat" may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as "red" or "blue." Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code's environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright.
Architecture and Design: For any security checks that are performed on the client side, ensure that these checks are duplicated on the server side, in order to avoid CWE-602. Attackers can bypass the client-side checks by modifying values after the checks have been performed, or by changing the client to remove the client-side checks entirely. Then, these modified values would be submitted to the server.
Architecture and Design: Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, typically by using increasing time delays uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed. The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question. The second solution can be difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply requires more resources on the part of the attacker.
Architecture and Design: Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
Architecture and Design, Implementation: If the program must fail, ensure that it fails gracefully (fails closed). There may be a temptation to simply let the program fail poorly in cases such as low memory conditions, but an attacker may be able to assert control before the software has fully exited. Alternately, an uncontrolled failure could cause cascading problems with other downstream components; for example, the program could send a signal to a downstream process so the process immediately knows that a problem has occurred and has a better chance of recovery. Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.
Operation, Architecture and Design: Use quotas or other resource-limiting settings provided by the operating system or environment. For example, when managing system resources in POSIX, setrlimit() can be used to set limits for certain types of resources, and getrlimit() can determine how many resources are available. However, these functions are not available on all operating systems. When the current levels get close to the maximum that is defined for the application (see CWE-770), then limit the allocation of further resources to privileged users; alternately, begin releasing resources for less-privileged users. While this mitigation may protect the system from attack, it will not necessarily stop attackers from adversely impacting other users. Ensure that the application performs the appropriate error checks and error handling in case resources become unavailable (CWE-703).

References

Packages

github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra

Timeline

Jul 2, 2026 Published
Oct 22, 2026 Last updated by the source
Oct 31, 2026 Latest EPSS score

Advisory	Severity	Why it's related
GHSA-ww9q-8r59-xv46 Zebra: Missing copy constraint in halo2_gadgets variable-base scalar multiplication allows under-constrained base, breaking Orchard Action circuit soundness	Critical	Also affects zebrad
GHSA-63wg-wjjj-7cp8 Zebra Address Book Aborted by IPv4-Mapped Mempool Misbehavior Update	High	Also affects zebrad
GHSA-65jj-fmw8-468q zebrad has unbounded memory leak in mempool download pipeline via timeout path cancel_handles retention	Medium	Also affects zebrad
GHSA-2gf8-q9rr-jq3h zebrad has persistent on-disk corruption of Sapling/Orchard subtree roots after chain fork via pop_tip	Medium	Also affects zebrad
GHSA-hhm7-qrv5-h4r6 Zebra: Repeated Non-Finalized Shielded Transaction Aborts Zebra Before Duplicate-Nullifier Rejection	Medium	Also affects zebrad
GHSA-w834-cf6p-9m9w Zebra: Finalized address balance credit-first overflow on consensus-valid blocks	Medium	Also affects zebrad
GHSA-gvjc-3w7c-92jx Zebra has sync restart poisoning from single unauthenticated peer via above-lookahead block	Medium	Also affects zebrad
GHSA-gf9r-m956-97qx zebrad has consensus divergence via P2SH sigop undercount in pure-Rust disabled-opcode parser	Critical	Also affects zebrad

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