CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-40394 — Varnish-Software Varnish Enterprise security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

Varnish Cache 9 before 9.0.1 and Varnish Enterprise before 6.0.16r11 allows a "workspace overflow" denial of service (daemon panic) for certain amounts of prefetched data. The setup of an HTTP/2 session starts with a speculative HTTP/1 transport, and upon upgrading to h2 the HTTP/1 request is repurposed as stream zero. During the upgrade, a buffer allocation is made to reserve space to send frames to the client. This allocation would split the original workspace, and depending on the amount of prefetched data, the next fetch could perform a pipelining operation that would run out of workspace.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-04-12
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-670

Affected products

  • varnish-software / varnish_enterprise
  • varnish-software / varnish_enterprise / 6.0.16
  • vinyl-cache / vinyl_cache / 9.0.0

Showing 3 representative product identities from 12 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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