CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2026-26998 — Traefik is an HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer
Traefik is an HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer. Prior to versions 2.11.38 and 3.6.9, there is a potential vulnerability in Traefik managing the ForwardAuth middleware responses. When Traefik is configured to use the ForwardAuth middleware, the response body from the authentication server is read entirely into memory without any size limit. There is no maxResponseBodySize configuration to restrict the amount of data read from the authentication server response. If the authentication server returns an unexpectedly large or unbounded response body, Traefik will allocate unlimited memory, potentially causing an out-of-memory (OOM) condition that crashes the process. This results in a denial of service for all routes served by the affected Traefik instance. This issue has been patched in versions 2.11.38 and 3.6.9.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 4.4 (3.1)
- Published
- 2026-03-05
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-770
Affected products
- traefik / traefik
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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