CVE-2026-16599
Reported by CERT-PL · Published August 25, 2026
GNU wget is vulnerable to denial of service in its FTP OPIE/S-KEY authentication functionality. The server-supplied sequence number from the FTP challenge line is used as an iteration count for an MD5 key-derivation loop without any upper bound validation. A malicious FTP server or a network attacker positioned to intercept FTP traffic can send a crafted OPIE challenge with a sequence number near INT_MAX, causing wget to perform up to approximately 2.1 billion MD5 computations and suspend for some time. The --timeout option does not mitigate this because it applies only to network I/O, not CPU computation. This issue was fixed in commit e9697d98e7249b0f68a6be040a4f3dcc5bc101fa
Risk Scores
Affected Products
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| GNU | wget | 0 |
| chainguard | wget | 0, 0, 0 |
| wolfi | wget | 0, 0, 0 |
| GNU | wget | 0 |
Timeline
- Aug 25, 2026 CVE Published
- Aug 25, 2026 CVE Updated
- Aug 26, 2026 EPSS Score
- Aug 30, 2026 EPSS Score
- Sep 2, 2026 Security Advisory
- Sep 4, 2026 EPSS Score
- Sep 9, 2026 EPSS Score
- Sep 12, 2026 EPSS Score
- Sep 16, 2026 EPSS Score
- Sep 18, 2026 EPSS Score
- Sep 21, 2026 EPSS Score
- Sep 22, 2026 EPSS Score