CVE-2017-6471 Wireshark CVE debrief

Who should care

Security teams, incident responders, and analysts who use Wireshark to open untrusted capture files or inspect live traffic should care, especially if they run Wireshark 2.2.0-2.2.4 or 2.0.0-2.0.10. Distributors and administrators managing those versions should also prioritize updates.

Technical summary

The vulnerability is a WSP dissector infinite loop in Wireshark. NVD classifies it as CWE-20 (Improper Input Validation) with a CVSS 3.0 vector of AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H. The impact is availability-only: malformed input or injected packets can cause the dissector to loop indefinitely. Wireshark’s fix was to validate the capability length in epan/dissectors/packet-wsp.c.

Defensive priority

High for environments that routinely process untrusted packet captures or network traffic. Because the issue can be triggered without privileges or user interaction and affects availability, affected deployments should be patched promptly.

Recommended defensive actions

• Upgrade Wireshark to a version outside the affected ranges (2.2.0-2.2.4 and 2.0.0-2.0.10) using the vendor or distribution update path.
• Apply the Wireshark security advisory guidance and any downstream distribution fixes relevant to your platform.
• Treat capture files from untrusted sources as potentially hostile and limit where and how they are opened.
• If you operate analysis infrastructure, monitor for repeated parser hangs or worker process stalls and isolate impacted systems until patched.

Evidence notes

This debrief is based only on the supplied NVD record and referenced official/vendor sources. The CVE published date used for timing context is 2017-03-04. NVD lists affected Wireshark ranges, CWE-20, the CVSS vector, and references to the Wireshark bug tracker, vendor advisory, and code commit that fixed the issue. No exploit steps or reproduction details are included.

Official resources