High · published August 19, 2026
ZEBRA is a Zcash node written entirely in Rust. Prior to 4.5.0, an unauthenticated IPv4 peer can deterministically terminate a synced Zebra node using the default Linux dual-stack listener configuration. The handshake path canonicalized an IPv4-mapped IPv6 PeerSocketAddr such as ::ffff:127.0.0.1 to plain IPv4 before storing it through MetaAddr::new_connected, but the mempool misbehavior path forwarded the raw transient address to MetaAddrChange::UpdateMisbehavior. In zebra-network/src/meta_addr.rs, apply_to_meta_addr then compared the canonical address-book entry with the raw update address and reached its unexpected address mismatch assertion. After the misbehavior batch flush, panic equals abort terminated zebrad; the peer only needed to complete a P2P handshake and advertise an invalid mempool transaction. This issue is fixed in version 4.5.0.