CVE-2026-111496
| Severity | 9.1 Critical CVSS 3.1 |
|---|---|
| Weakness | Integer overflow (CWE-190) |
| Published | 28 Oct 2026 |
| Updated | 5 Nov 2026 |
Published 17 days ago. NVD often adds the list of affected products days or weeks after a CVE is published, and the other sources we check lag too. The scope and status here may change.
Description
Kafka Streams derives its stream-time clock from record timestamps. PunctuationSchedule.next() computed the next punctuation time as timestamp + (intervalsMissed + 1) * interval with no overflow check. A record with a timestamp at or near Long.MAX_VALUE advances stream time to that value, so the next stream-time punctuation overflows to a negative time. PunctuationQueue then re-queues that time and loops on it indefinitely while holding a lock, stalling the StreamThread. Impact: A single record is enough. The affected StreamThread stops processing, and because the record stays in the topic the hang returns on restart; an application whose partitions are all affected becomes unresponsive. Only the Streams application is affected, not the brokers or the cluster. Triggering it needs write access to a source topic whose topology uses stream-time punctuation, and a broker that stores the record: brokers from Apache Kafka 4.0.0 reject such a timestamp by default (log.message.timestamp.after.max.ms, one hour), so it is reachable only on older brokers or where that bound has been relaxed. Mitigation: Upgrade Kafka Streams to 4.2.2, 4.3.2, or 4.4.0. As defense in depth, keep log.message.timestamp.after.max.ms bounded on source topics and restrict write access to them. Resolution: From Apache Kafka 4.2.2, 4.3.2, and 4.4.0: the next punctuation time is computed with overflow-checked arithmetic (clamped to Long.MAX_VALUE), and a rescheduled punctuation is re-queued only when its time moves forward.
CWE-835
Exploitation status
No public exploit
No exploit has been reported in the sources we check.
Exploitation status
- CISA KEV not listed
- VulnCheck KEV not listed
- CISA Vulnrichment exploitation: none
- Indexed PoC none indexed
- EPSS 0.51% chance in 30 days
Waratek protection
Within Waratek scope. In the sources we check, nobody has published exploit code for this CVE or reported it being exploited.
VRT has not found a public code change for this CVE yet.
- Protection none
- Action not pursued
- Review automated Upstream data
- Record active
| Decided by | Nothing to build a rule from yet: no published exploit, no CISA record of exploitation and no source-level change to read |
|---|---|
| Finding | This CVE affects a known product, but nothing published names a fix and nothing published shows an exploit. That is a statement about the evidence, not about the defect — it does not mean the vulnerability is unimportant or unreachable, only that neither of the two things VRT can act on exists. |
References
| URL | Tags |
|---|---|
| https://kafka.apache.org/cve-list | |
| http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/10/28/14 |
Timeline
Timeline
| Published | 2026-10-28 | By the CVE Program. |
|---|---|---|
| NVD record modified | 2026-11-05 | NVD's own last-modified date for this record. |