CVE-2026-35549: MariaDB's caching_sha2_password Plugin Can Crash Your Database — and Most Distro Packages Still Haven't Fixed It
MariaDB patched CVE-2026-35549 on April 3, 2026. Seven weeks later, the fixed packages haven’t landed in the official repositories of RHEL 8, 9, and 10, Ubuntu LTS releases, or CentOS 8. If you’re running distro-packaged MariaDB and have the caching_sha2_password authentication plugin in use, your database server can be crashed by any authenticated user with a single oversized packet. What the Bug Is The vulnerability lives in the caching_sha2_password authentication plugin — MariaDB’s compatibility layer for the plugin MySQL 8.0 made default. When processing an authentication request, the plugin calls sha256_crypt_r, which allocates memory via alloca(). Unlike malloc(), alloca() grabs memory directly from the stack with no size check whatsoever. Feed it a packet that’s large enough, and the function attempts to allocate more stack space than exists, causing the server process to crash immediately. ...