CVEPublished 2026-05-05Modified 2026-05-121 article on news6 live referencesNVD data

CVE-2026-39849Pi-hole · Ftldns

Vulnerability data via NVD (ingested)

CVSS v3.1
8.8
HIGH
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS percentile
Description

Pi-hole FTL is the core engine of the Pi-hole network-level advertisement and tracker blocker. In versions before 6.6.1, the `dns.interface` configuration field in Pi-hole FTL accepted newline characters without validation, allowing an attacker to inject arbitrary directives into the generated dnsmasq configuration file. On installations with no admin password set (the default for many deployments), the configuration API is fully accessible without credentials, allowing a network-adjacent attacker to inject the payload, enable the built-in DHCP server, and achieve arbitrary command execution on the host the next time any device on the network requests a DHCP lease. The injected value is persisted to /etc/pihole/pihole.toml and survives restarts. The strncpy in the code path limits the total interface field to 31 bytes, but payloads such as wlan0\ndhcp-script=/tmp/p fit within this constraint. The dnsmasq config validation introduced in FTL 6.6 only checks syntactic validity, so valid directives injected via newline pass validation successfully. This issue has been fixed in version 6.6.1.

Timeline
Published 2026-05-05
Modified 2026-05-12

External references

Search for exposed instances

Shodan + Censys queries derived from NVD's CPE data. The vuln tag catches assets Shodan has explicitly linked to this CVE; the product / banner fingerprints find exposed instances even when the vuln tag was never applied (which is common).

More intel sources (5)

Known PoCs on GitHub

No public proof-of-concept repositories found for CVE-2026-39849 on GitHub.