CVE-2023-34966: Debian Linux

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 62.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

An infinite loop vulnerability was found in Samba's mdssvc RPC service for Spotlight. When parsing Spotlight mdssvc RPC packets sent by the client, the core unmarshalling function sl_unpack_loop() did not validate a field in the network packet that contains the count of elements in an array-like structure. By passing 0 as the count value, the attacked function will run in an endless loop consuming 100% CPU. This flaw allows an attacker to issue a malformed RPC request, triggering an infinite loop, resulting in a denial of service condition.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 11.0 only; version 12.0 only
• Fedoraproject Fedora: version 37 only; version 38 only
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 8.0 only; version 9.0 only
• Samba Samba: before 4.16.11 (fixed in 4.16.11); from 4.17.0, before 4.17.10 (fixed in 4.17.10); from 4.18.0, before 4.18.5 (fixed in 4.18.5)

Published 2023-07-20. Last modified 2026-06-17.