CVE-2026-40396

NameCVE-2026-40396
DescriptionVarnish 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.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
varnish (PTS)bullseye6.5.1-1+deb11u3fixed
bullseye (security)6.5.1-1+deb11u5fixed
bookworm, bookworm (security)7.1.1-2+deb12u1fixed
trixie7.7.0-3fixed
forky, sid7.7.3-2fixed

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
varnishsource(unstable)(not affected)

Notes

- varnish <not-affected> (Specific to Varnish 9 after the Vinyl/Varnish branching)
https://github.com/varnish/varnish/issues/15
https://github.com/varnish/varnish/releases/tag/varnish-9.0.1
https://docs.varnish-software.com/security/VEV00002/

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