Medium severity · published Aug 5, 2026
CVE-2026-55996
Unauthenticated Denial-of-Service via TLS SAN Stuffing in Rancher and cattle-cluster-agent
4.3
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
A denial-of-service vulnerability was identified in multiple TLS listeners in Rancher. Both the cattle-cluster-agent component running in downstream clusters and the Rancher server itself use the dynamiclistener library to serve TLS traffic. Without an effective CN filter configured, dynamiclistener automatically appended to each serving certificate any hostname presented via Server Name Indication (SNI) in incoming TLS requests.
An unauthenticated attacker with network access within the affected cluster could send a large number of TLS requests with distinct hostnames, causing the serving certificate to accumulate an unbounded number of Subject Alternative Names (SANs). Eventually, the certificate grows large enough that TLS handshakes fail with an excessive message size error, causing a denial of service on the affected listeners.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.2% · higher than 16% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
RA
Rancher · SUSE
2.11.0 before 2.11.16; 2.12.0 before 2.12.12; 2.13.0 before 2.13.8; 2.14.0 before 2.14.4 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-55996
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-55996
bugzilla.suse.com
https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2026-55996
github.com
https://github.com/rancher/rancher/security/advisories/GHSA-9jxv-832x-45q9
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