CVE-2026-42304: twisted Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-42304 is a high (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in twisted. EPSS estimates a 0.95% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 60.6% of scored vulnerabilities. 1 public exploit is recorded.

Timeline

1. 13-05-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 14-05-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Twisted is an event-based framework for internet applications, supporting Python 3.6+. Prior to 26.4.0rc2, the twisted.names module is vulnerable to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack via resource exhaustion during DNS name decompression. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this by sending a crafted TCP DNS packet containing deeply chained compression pointers. This flaw bypasses previous loop-prevention logic, causing the single-threaded Twisted reactor to hang while processing millions of recursive lookups, effectively freezing the server. This vulnerability is fixed in 26.4.0rc2.

• CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource ConsumptionThe product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
• CWE-407Inefficient Algorithmic ComplexityAn algorithm in a product has an inefficient worst-case computational complexity that may be detrimental to system performance and can be triggered by an attacker, typically using crafted manipulations that ensure that the worst case is being reached.