Researchers disclosed CVE-2026-32746, a decades-old pre-authentication buffer overflow in GNU inetutils telnetd that lives in the LINEMODE SLC (Set Linemode Characters) negotiation handler. The bug, traceable to 1994, lets an attacker overflow a fixed-size global array and corrupt roughly 400 bytes of adjacent memory. Because many vendors forked or copied the same Telnet codebase, the vulnerability appears in inetutils-telnetd and in numerous distributions and products (Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD/NetBSD/DragonFly, Citrix NetScaler, Apple Mac Tahoe, TrueNAS Core, Haiku, uCLinux, libmtev, etc.), so the blast radius is large even though a patch has been landed in upstream inetutils.
Technically, the flaw arises when the server accepts in-band Telnet negotiations: LINEMODE SLC values are sent as one-byte triplets (function, flag, value) that get stored without bounds checking. Process_slc and change_slc impose several transformations and restrictions - triplets with func > NSLC are sanitized, func==0 triggers special handling, and flag bits are masked/translated - so full control over overflow contents is constrained. That constraint makes exploitation nuanced: attackers can corrupt memory but crafting a reliable RCE is complicated by input munging and limited controllable bytes. The researchers isolated the bug, compared it to the analogous 2005 client-side CVE-2005-0469, and detail why the vulnerability is both dangerous and tricky to weaponize.
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