CVE-2022-39028: Debian Linux

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 2.1% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

telnetd in GNU Inetutils through 2.3, MIT krb5-appl through 1.0.3, and derivative works has a NULL pointer dereference via 0xff 0xf7 or 0xff 0xf8. In a typical installation, the telnetd application would crash but the telnet service would remain available through inetd. However, if the telnetd application has many crashes within a short time interval, the telnet service would become unavailable after inetd logs a "telnet/tcp server failing (looping), service terminated" error. NOTE: MIT krb5-appl is not supported upstream but is shipped by a few Linux distributions. The affected code was removed from the supported MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) product many years ago, at version 1.8.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 10.0 only
• GNU InetUtils: up to and including 2.3
• Mit Kerberos 5: up to and including 1.0.3
• Netkit-Telnet Project Netkit-Telnet: up to and including 0.17

Published 2022-08-30. Last modified 2026-06-17.