Description

CERT Polska has received a report about vulnerability in GNU wget software and participated in coordination of its disclosure.

The vulnerability CVE-2026-16599: 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.

Credits

We thank Michał Majchrowicz and Marcin Wyczechowski from AFINE Team for the responsible vulnerability report.