Resource exhaustion in SUSE Rancher

CVE-2026-55996

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.

EPSS: 0.002 (4.6th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 4.3 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-55996?
CVE-2026-55996 is a medium-severity vulnerability in SUSE Rancher, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 4.3/10. Published 2026-08-05.
How severe is CVE-2026-55996?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 4.3 out of 10.