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Werk #22116: Agent receiver: limit the size of decompressed push agent data

Component Checks & agents
Title Agent receiver: limit the size of decompressed push agent data
Date Aug 17, 2026
Level Trivial Change
Class Security Fix
Compatibility Compatible - no manual interaction needed
Checkmk versions & editions
3.0.0b1
Not yet released
Checkmk Ultimate, Checkmk Cloud, Checkmk Ultimate MT
2.5.0p14 Checkmk Ultimate, Checkmk Cloud, Checkmk Ultimate MT
2.4.0p37
Not yet released
Checkmk Ultimate, Checkmk Cloud, Checkmk Ultimate MT
2.3.0p51
Not yet released
Checkmk Ultimate, Checkmk Ultimate MT

Agent data that push hosts send to the agent receiver is zlib compressed, and the receiver decompressed it without any limit on the resulting size. Since compressed data can expand by orders of magnitude, a push host could send a small payload that decompresses to an arbitrary amount of data and exhaust the memory of the agent receiver.

The agent receiver now rejects agent data whose decompressed size exceeds 512 MiB and answers such requests with "Decompression of agent data failed". Agent output of legitimate hosts stays far below that limit, so no reconfiguration is required after updating.

This issue has been discovered and reported by Sven Jäger (SySS GmbH). Thanks!

Who is Affected

Editions that provide the push mode, i.e. Checkmk Ultimate, Ultimate with multi-tenancy, and Checkmk Cloud. Exploiting the issue requires the client certificate of a host that is registered for push mode, so an attacker needs to control such a host.

Affected Checkmk Versions

  • 2.5.0
  • 2.4.0
  • 2.3.0
  • 2.2.0 (EOL)

Vulnerability Management

We have rated the issue with a CVSS Score of 5.3 Medium (CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N) and assigned CVE-2026-77021.

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