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VulnerabilityPublished Updated

CVE-2026-39849: pi-hole FTL · CRLF Injection

Affects pi-hole FTLSource CVE Database V5

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Not known to be exploited · CVSS 8.7 High : upgrade to 6.6.1 soon.

Data as of 2 Nov 2026, 10:58 UTC

CVSS 4.0 base score
8.7High
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.
EPSS
0.9% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 61% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
Patch
Available – fixed in 6.6.1
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 5 May 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponized: no evidence on record.

    No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq Mirage: no evidence on record.

    No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 2 Nov 2026.

What to do

Upgrade FTL and pi-hole/FTL to 6.6.1.

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
pi-holeFTLAffected
  • <6.6.1
Fixed in
  • 6.6.1
GitHubpi-hole/FTLpkg:github/pi-hole/FTLOther threatsAffected
  • <6.6.1
Fixed in
  • 6.6.1

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

AI-suggested

This vulnerability is fixed in Pi-hole FTL version 6.6.1. Users should upgrade to version 6.6.1 or later to remediate this issue. Additionally, setting an admin password on the Pi-hole installation prevents unauthenticated access to the configuration API, mitigating the risk of exploitation. Patch status is not explicitly confirmed in the vendor advisory, but the fix is stated to be included in version 6.6.1.

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.

References

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