An infinite loop and memory leak can be triggered when Wireshark processes specific USB HID packets due to improper sequence control and missing bounds checks. The flaw causes continuous allocation of memory until system resources are exhausted, making the application unresponsive or causing it to crash. This is a resource exhaustion vulnerability, documented as CWE‑1325 and CWE‑835, and results in denial of service for anyone attempting to analyze traffic.

Wireshark Foundation’s Wireshark product is affected. The issue exists in Wireshark releases 4.6.0 through 4.6.8 and 4.4.0 through 4.4.18. Users running these versions and analyzing USB HID traffic are at risk; no other vendors or products are listed as impacted at this time.

The CVSS score of 5.5 indicates a moderate risk level. The EPSS score of less than 1% shows that the likelihood of exploitation is currently low. The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog. Based on the description, it is inferred that an attacker would need to supply crafted USB HID packets to a system running a vulnerable Wireshark version, which could be achieved with a malicious USB device or by local manipulation of USB traffic. Successful exploitation would cause Wireshark to hang or crash, denying the user the ability to capture or analyze network traffic.