Findings

CVE-2026-39849

Pi-hole FTL is the core engine of the Pi-hole network-level advertisement and tracker blocker.

Published May 5, 2026 · updated Jul 24, 2026 · pi-hole ftldns

Pi-hole FTL is the core engine of the Pi-hole network-level advertisement and tracker blocker. In versions before 6.6.1, the 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.

Code

The project this record applies to. Exploit listings stay in References.

Timeline

Detection, updates, and resolution for this record.

  1. May 5, 2026 · NIST NVD

    Detected

    Pi-hole FTL is the core engine of the Pi-hole network-level advertisement and tracker blocker. In versions before 6.6.1, the 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 configura

  2. Jul 24, 2026 · NIST NVD

    Updated

    Pi-hole FTL is the core engine of the Pi-hole network-level advertisement and tracker blocker. In versions before 6.6.1, the 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 configura

Affected

  • cpe pi-hole/ftldns6.6

Sources

  • CVE.orgVulnerability recordCVE-2026-39849

    Official CVE identifier

    cve.org
  • NIST NVDVulnerability recordCVE-2026-39849

    Pi-hole FTL is the core engine of the Pi-hole network-level advertisement and tracker blocker. In versions before 6.6.1, the configuration field in Pi-hole FTL accepted newline characters without validation, allowing an attacker to inject arbitrary directives into

    nvd.nist.gov

References