CVE-2026-96418

A flaw was found in Wireshark. By convincing a user to open a specially crafted packet capture containing Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) data, an attacker can trigger an infinite loop in the TIFF protocol dissector. This issue causes the application to hang and become unresponsive, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS).

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Disable the TIFF protocol dissector in Wireshark or tshark to prevent processing of malformed TIFF packets:

1. In the Wireshark GUI: Navigate to Analyze -> Enabled Protocols..., search for "TIFF", uncheck the entry, and click OK.

2. When using the command-line utility tshark: Append the --disable-protocol tiff option to the command: tshark --disable-protocol tiff -r <capture_file>

Caveats: Disabling this protocol prevents decoding and analyzing TIFF image payloads within packet captures. In addition, avoid opening capture files from untrusted sources, and avoid executing packet analysis utilities under root or privileged accounts. No service restart is required as Wireshark operates as a user-space utility.