CVE-2026-109678

6.5Medium

Published 13 Oct 2026 · NVD status: Undergoing Analysis · AI triage by gemini-3.8-flash

6.5Medium

Attack vector: Network
Complexity: Low
Privileges needed: None
User interaction: Required
Impact: High impact on availability
Weakness: CWE-617

Impact

A malicious RDP server can crash connecting FreeRDP clients, causing a denial of service. The attack requires a user to connect to the attacker's server with smartcard emulation active.

Root cause

The emulated SCardStatusA function passes a NULL reader-name pointer to scard_copy_strings, triggering a reachable assertion abort when built with verbose WinPR assertions.

Affected systems

FreeRDP 3.0.0-beta1 before 3.32.0 (when built with verbose WinPR assertions and smartcard emulation enabled)

CVSS v3.1 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Fix & remediation

Upgrade FreeRDP to version 3.32.0 or newer. As an interim mitigation, disable smartcard redirection when connecting to untrusted RDP hosts, or recompile FreeRDP without verbose WinPR assertions.

shell

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade freerdp3-x11

AI-suggested. Run it in staging first and check it against the vendor advisory. Why?

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NVD description

FreeRDP 3.0.0-beta1 before 3.32.0, when built with verbose WinPR assertions and using smartcard emulation, has a reachable assertion: the emulated SCardStatusA passes a NULL reader-name destination to scard_copy_strings. A malicious RDP server can send an SCardStatusA request with fmszReaderNamesIsNULL=1 to abort a connecting client.

References

Source: nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-109678