Denial of Service Vulnerability in Nmap by Nmap Development Team

CVE-2026-72712

What is CVE-2026-72712?

Nmap versions up to and including 7.99 are susceptible to a denial of service vulnerability that allows remote attackers to crash the application. This is achieved by sending a specifically crafted packet containing a zero-length TCP option. The malformed packet triggers the Packet:parse_options() function in nselib/packet.lua, resulting in an infinite loop that leads to excessive memory allocation. Consequently, this causes the application to experience an out-of-memory condition, ultimately crashing Nmap.

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