varnish: Varnish Cache: Denial of Service via workspace overflow during HTTP/1 pipelining
Published Apr 12, 2026
7.5
HIGHCVSS 3.1
EPSS 0.45%
Description
Varnish Cache 9 before 9.0.1 allows a "workspace overflow" denial of service (daemon panic) after timeout_linger. A malicious client could send an HTTP/1 request, wait long enough until the session releases its worker thread (timeout_linger) and resume traffic before the session is closed (timeout_idle) sending more than one request at once to trigger a pipelining operation between requests. This vulnerability affecting Varnish Cache 9.0.0 emerged from a port of the Varnish Enterprise non-blocking architecture for HTTP/2. New code was needed to adapt to a more recent workspace API that formalizes the pipelining operation. In addition to the workspace change on the Varnish Cache side, other differences created merge conflicts, like partial support for trailers in Varnish Enterprise. The conflict resolution missed one code path configuring pipelining to perform a complete workspace rollback, losing the guarantee that prefetched data would fit inside workspace_client during the transition from one request to the next. This can result in a workspace overflow, triggering a panic and crashing the Varnish server.
Affected products
-
- Version 9.0.0StatusaffectedConstraints<9.0.1
- Version
Default status is the baseline for the product, each version can override it (e.g. patched versions marked unaffected).
| Vendor | Product | Default status | Versions | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Varnish-Software | Varnish Cache | unaffected |
|
- 9.0.0
No data.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
varnish
Not affected
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
varnish:6/varnish
Not affected
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
varnish
Not affected
| Product | Package | State | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 | varnish | Not affected | n/a |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | varnish:6/varnish | Not affected | n/a |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | varnish | Not affected | n/a |
No package ranges for this CVE.
Remediation
No remediation recorded yet.
References (7)
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-40396 Vendor Advisory
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2457697 Issue Tracking
- https://euvd.enisa.europa.eu/vulnerability/EUVD-2026-21742 Advisory
- https://github.com/varnish/varnish/issues/15 Issue Tracking
- https://github.com/varnish/varnish/releases/tag/varnish-9.0.1 Product
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-40396
- https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-40396
Change history (0)
No recorded changes yet.