Resource exhaustion in Hashicorp Consul

CVE-2026-15972

Consul Community Edition and Consul Enterprise 1.13.0 through 2.0.2 are vulnerable to an unauthenticated denial of service through unbounded connection acceptance on the external gRPC listeners. A remote attacker may exhaust agent file descriptors, goroutines, and memory by opening many incomplete connections, potentially preventing legitimate clients from connecting. This vulnerability, CVE-2026-15972, is fixed in Consul 2.0.3 and Consul Enterprise 1.21.17, 1.22.11, and 2.0.3.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.5 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (46.0th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 46th percentile — 46.0% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-15972: held from 0.005 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.005 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-15972?
CVE-2026-15972 is a high-severity vulnerability in Hashicorp Consul, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 7.5/10. Published 2026-08-07.
How severe is CVE-2026-15972?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.5 out of 10.