Bug 2519497 (CVE-2026-76235)

Summary: CVE-2026-76235 cockpit-ws: cockpit: cockpit-ws: unauthenticated remote memory leak via CockpitLang cookie in send_login_html
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: mvollmer, rhel-process-autobot, sdawley, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Doc Text:
A memory leak flaw was found in cockpit-ws. The login page handler leaks a heap allocation on every unauthenticated request that carries a CockpitLang cookie, allowing a remote unauthenticated attacker to exhaust memory on the host and cause a denial of service.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Bug Depends On: 2519502    
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-19 11:46:27 UTC
A flaw was found in cockpit-ws. The send_login_html() function in src/ws/cockpithandlers.c reads the CockpitLang cookie via cockpit_web_server_parse_cookie(), which returns a heap-allocated string (via g_uri_unescape_segment, transfer-full ownership). On this code path, the function's only cleanup call is g_strfreev(languages), but languages remains NULL when the value came from the cookie rather than the Accept-Language header, so the allocated 'language' string is never freed. Every unauthenticated GET request to the login page carrying a CockpitLang cookie leaks one heap allocation sized by the (attacker-controlled) decoded cookie value, up to Cockpit's ~8192-byte request-size cap. Sustained requests grow the shared cockpit-ws process's memory without bound, eventually causing it to be OOM-killed and disrupting all users of that instance, not just the attacker.

Candidate upstream fix (Martin Vollmer):
  if (languages)
    g_strfreev (languages);
  else
    g_free (language);

Comment 2 Marius Vollmer 2026-08-20 12:27:45 UTC
Proposed fix: https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/pull/23633