The Kerberos kadmind service in MIT Kerberos 5 contains a memory leak. The RPCSEC_GSS authentication routines in lib/rpc/authgss_prot.c do not free partially decoded buffers when a decoding error occurs. An attacker who can send crafted RPCSEC_GSS messages to kadmind can trigger a persistent memory leak, which will eventually consume available RAM and cause kadmind to become unresponsive, resulting in a denial‑of‑service condition. This flaw is classified as CWE‑772.

Red Hat distributions including RHEL 10, RHEL 6, RHEL 7, RHEL 8, and RHEL 9, as well as Red Hat Hardened Images, ship the affected Kerberos libraries. The vulnerability is present in the standard kadmind daemon that these systems run.

The Base CVSS score of 5.3 indicates moderate severity. No EPSS score is available, and the issue is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog, suggesting limited known exploitation. The exploit requires network access to the kadmind RPC service and is unauthenticated, so it is likely to be used against hosts that expose the service on trusted or internal networks. The risk can be mitigated by patching or by restricting remote access to the service.