CISA added CVE-2026-116779 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue on 9 November 2026, with a federal due date of 12 November 2026. The FreeSWITCH vulnerability is a code-injection flaw in how inbound SIP MESSAGE requests select chat protocols, detailed in SignalWire’s advisory GHSA-mg63-h38w-8p9p.
Affected versions are FreeSWITCH through 1.11.2; fixed versions are 1.11.3 and later. The KEV listing sits alongside other 9 November additions already covered by TSN, including the SonicWall SSLVPN KEV pattern and the Alpine OpenSSH bypass. Binding Operational Directive 22-01 sets the federal remediation clock; for operators outside that scope, the due date is still the clearest public urgency mark on the calendar.
CISA’s ransomware-use field on a KEV entry is a catalogue label, not a substitute for an advisory that names a ransomware family. This write-up stays with the advisory’s own impact language and does not invent victim counts or campaign names.
What the advisory says an attacker can do
The advisory’s summary: sofia_presence_handle_sip_i_message() splits the To user of an inbound SIP MESSAGE on + and treats the left half as a chat proto name, dispatching the message to whichever registered chat interface matches. mod_dptools registers an api chat interface that hands its address to switch_api_execute(). A peer that can deliver a MESSAGE to a profile therefore selects which FreeSWITCH API command the server runs.
Impact, in the advisory’s words: “Command execution with the privileges of the FreeSWITCH process: arbitrary OS commands, disclosure of configuration and credentials, and full call control.” It adds that where mod_lua is loaded, as stock configuration does, inline Lua with the full standard library is reachable as a second sink. “Exploitation of this path has been observed in the wild.”
Default profiles are in scope: chat handling is on unless a profile sets enable-chat=false, and stock conf/vanilla leaves it on for internal and external profiles. “The inbound ACL does not cover MESSAGE, so tightening it does not take a profile out of scope.” That sentence matters for operators who assumed an ACL change was enough.
Patch and workarounds
Upgrade to FreeSWITCH 1.11.3 or later. The fix introduces a per-profile enable-chat-api-proto parameter that is off unless explicitly enabled, so inbound MESSAGE requests cannot select the api chat proto by default. Distributors and packaged builds should be checked for 1.11.3 availability rather than assuming the version string alone proves the parameter is present.
As a workaround on systems that do not need inbound SIP chat, set enable-chat=false on every such profile. The advisory says that stops the message before the proto selector is parsed. It also warns that auth-messages alone is not sufficient, and that disable_system_api_commands=true removes the system API but does not close the route. Those partial mitigations are easy to misread as complete fixes; they are not.
Chat protocols should not be a remote command channel
Turning a messaging selector into an API dispatcher collapses two trust boundaries that telephony stacks usually keep apart: who may send a chat MESSAGE, and who may run administrative commands. When the default profile accepts MESSAGE and registers an api proto, a single delivered request becomes a remote control plane for the FreeSWITCH process.
That is why the durable mitigation is both a version bump and a default-off switch for API proto selection. Operators who only tighten ACLs, or who assume MESSAGE authentication equals safety, still leave the selector reachable for any authenticated peer the advisory describes—including empty-password directory users in stock vanilla configs. The attack does not need a novel protocol; it needs the selector and a path that delivers MESSAGE.
The useful next evidence is whether public scans show 1.11.2-and-older profiles still accepting MESSAGE with chat enabled, and whether distributors ship 1.11.3 as the default package promptly after the KEV due date. Until then, treat 12 November as the federal deadline and 1.11.3—or enable-chat=false—as the practical response.
Sources
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SonicWall’s SSLVPN KEV listing is the format precedent for how TSN tracks CISA due dates on infrastructure CVEs without inventing victim counts.
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