Skip to content
OpenAdvisories
Medium · 4.0 CVE-2026-40396 EUVD-2026-21742GHSA-5pmq-jgg5-3j6q

Varnish Cache 9 before 9.0.1 allows a "workspace overflow" denial of service (daemon panic) after timeout_linger. A malicious client could …

Published Apr 12, 2026 · Updated Apr 13, 2026 · Assigned by mitre

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

VendorProductAffectedFixed
varnish-software Varnish Cache 9.0.0 – < 9.0.1 9.0.1

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 varnish No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS varnish No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 varnish No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS varnish No fix yet —
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS varnish No fix yet —
Show 4 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS varnish No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS varnish No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS varnish No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS varnish No fix yet —

Advisories 1

References