CVE-2026-49838
Found through variant analysis based on CVE-2026-41643
Summary
GoBGP accepts a zero-length AS_PATH during UPDATE decoding and later panics while validating that attribute for a confederation eBGP peer. The vulnerable path is in the BGP UPDATE validator: a malformed UPDATE that should be rejected as a malformed AS_PATH instead reaches an unchecked p.Value[0] access, allowing a configured confederation eBGP peer to trigger a denial of service.
Affected
- Project: gobgp
- Repo: https://github.com/osrg/gobgp
- Pinned ref: c24629411ba49f160d9dc09126f418218127e016
Root cause
An established peer's receive path reads BGP bytes from the network connection in pkg/server/fsm.go:1267, parses UPDATE bodies through the BGP message decoder, and validates decoded UPDATEs with peer state at pkg/server/fsm.go:1849. The UPDATE decoder walks the path-attribute list in pkg/packet/bgp/bgp.go:15773 and selects the concrete attribute parser from the attacker-controlled attribute type at pkg/packet/bgp/bgp.go:15855. For AS_PATH, PathAttributeAsPath.DecodeFromBytes returns nil when the decoded attribute length is zero (pkg/packet/bgp/bgp.go:11533, pkg/packet/bgp/bgp.go:11538), leaving p.Value empty rather than reporting a malformed attribute. Validation then dispatches each decoded attribute through ValidateAttribute (pkg/packet/bgp/validate.go:34); in the confederation eBGP branch, pkg/packet/bgp/validate.go:162 indexes p.Value[0] before checking that any AS_PATH segment was decoded. The eBGP and confederation guards are normal peer-state gates: pkg/config/oc/util.go:127 defines eBGP as peer AS differing from local AS, pkg/config/oc/util.go:116 checks confederation membership, and pkg/server/fsm.go:740 and pkg/server/fsm.go:741 copy those results into the FSM state used by the validator.
Reproduction
INT-bgp-gobgp-confed-empty-aspath-panic.zip
bash ./poc/run.sh
TRIGGERED: confed empty AS_PATH validation panic: runtime error: index out of range
The TRIGGERED line is the recovered pan
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Advisory coverage (1)
- mediumGHSA-frrj-87jh-2772: GoBGP confederation validation panics on empty AS_PATH attributeghsa · 2026-07-09
External references
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[](https://www.csirts.com/cve/CVE-2026-49838)