CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-69232 — free5GC is an open-source project for 5th generation (5G) mobile core networks

High CVSS 7.5

free5GC is an open-source project for 5th generation (5G) mobile core networks. free5GC go-upf versions up to and including 1.2.6, corresponding to free5gc smf up to and including 1.4.0, have an Improper Input Validation and Protocol Compliance vulnerability leading to Denial of Service. Remote attackers can disrupt core network functionality by sending a malformed PFCP Association Setup Request. The UPF incorrectly accepts it, entering an inconsistent state that causes subsequent legitimate requests to trigger SMF reconnection loops and service degradation. All deployments of free5GC using the UPF and SMF components may be affected. As of time of publication, a fix is in development but not yet available. No direct workaround is available at the application level. Applying the official patch, once released, is recommended.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-02-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • free5gc / go-upf
  • free5gc / smf

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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