Unauthenticated RCE in Dell Secure Connect Gateway 5.0 (CVE-2026-87079)
CVSS 3.1
7.5high
EPSS
—
Published
()
Modified
AI analysis
The CVE allows CPU exhaustion in Dell Secure Connect Gateways using long Perl labels, with a high CVSS score. It was disclosed but no public PoC exists.
What to do: Upgrade to the latest version to eliminate CPU exhaustion. Check for any plugins with large active installs. Consider updating firewall rules or service configurations.
Affected
Dell Secure Connect Gateway 5.0
5.0
Dell Secure Connect Gateway 4.0
4.0
Estimated exposure
moderateNo basis for an estimate.
Order-of-magnitude estimate by the model from install counts, market share and public scan data it knows; verify before quoting.
Description
Net::IDN::Punycode versions before 2.590 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic insertion cost when decoding a long label in decode_punycode. The XS backend inserts each decoded code point into a UTF-8 buffer and finds the insertion point by scanning that buffer from the start, one character at a time. The scan runs once per code point over the output built so far, so the cost is quadratic in the label length. The pure-Perl backend downgrades its input to bytes so that substr can index it directly, but takes its working copy before the downgrade, so when the input carries the UTF-8 flag every substr on the copy scans from the start, with the same quadratic cost. Nothing bounds the label length in the to-Unicode direction. The 63-byte DNS limit is checked only when converting to ASCII, so domain_to_unicode and uts46_to_unicode pass an attacker-supplied label of any length to the decoder.
Perl Net::IDN::Punycode before 2.590 can exhaust CPU decoding a long Punycode label.
Paul Johnson disclosed CVE-2026-87079 in Perl's Net::IDN::Punycode, part of Net-IDN-Encode. Versions before 2.590 can exhaust CPU because decode_punycode pays a quadratic insertion cost when decoding a long label. The issue is a denial-of-service flaw; no exploitation in the wild is reported. It is fixed in 2.590.