Nlnetlabs: >> Unbound >> 1.23.1 Security Vulnerabilities
In NLnetLabs Unbound up to and including 1.26.0, a degradation of service vulnerability is present in the TCP/DoT reading procedure where there is no limit on consecutive reads. A malicious actor that can stream and sustain a rate of distinct uncached names over the TCP/DoT connection, monopolizes a single worker's entire event loop for as long as its writes stay ahead of the drain.
CVSS Score
5.3
EPSS Score
0.005
Published
2026-09-16
In NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including 1.26.0, a 255 length query name with a large TCP response can lead to a heap buffer overflow during the RRSet canonicalisation routine. This is caused by missing to add the first owner name into the buffer length check. A malicious actor operating a malicious name server or tampering with an incoming response to Unbound (canonicalisation happens before DNSSEC validation), can trigger the vulnerability.
CVSS Score
7.5
EPSS Score
0.005
Published
2026-09-16
In NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including 1.26.0, a vulnerability was found in the DNSSEC validator that enables denial of service and possible remote code execution as a result of digesting DNSKEYs. A DNSKEY with an owner compression pointer to its own RDATA can overflow the digest buffer. Remote code execution is possible through attacker controlled data. An adversary can exploit the vulnerability by controlling a malicious zone and querying a vulnerable Unbound.
CVSS Score
9.1
EPSS Score
0.01
Published
2026-09-16
In NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including 1.26.0, a vulnerability was found in that can progressively corrupt heap memory and under certain systems and compilation options could lead to remote code execution. The vulnerability starts when CNAME synthesis during an upstream response needs to enforce(rewrite) a max TTL value in the packet buffer. Coupled with a compression pointer that points to the overwritten value and invalidates the domain name, it leads to an error path that does not properly move the buffer position and allows for the heap buffer overflow. Since this is heavily reliant on heap memory layout, results are memory corruption that eventually leads to a crash and under specific systems and compilation options remote code execution.
CVSS Score
8.4
EPSS Score
0.008
Published
2026-09-16
NLnet Labs Unbound 1.12.0 up to and including 1.26.0 has a use-after-free vulnerability when compiled for DNS-over-HTTPs support with '--with-libnghttp2'. During failure code paths (i.e., RPZ drop query, jostle due to heavy traffic), a dropped DoH stream brings down the whole DoH session and does not account properly for other DoH streams in the same session. This leads to use-after-free in those code paths. If the prerequisites are satisfied (possible RPZ drop or heavy client traffic), a malicious actor can trigger the vulnerability with a single DoH connection and the appropriate traffic. Impact is limited as the reads are not user controlled and the use-after-free leads to early returns. However, a hardened allocator can catch the use-after-free and controllably terminate the process resulting to denial of service.
CVSS Score
5.9
EPSS Score
0.004
Published
2026-09-16
Novel vulnerabilities to launch algorithmic complexity attacks on DNSSEC have been researched under the term 'ReTrap'. These result in degradation of service when malicious zones are used to serve the algorithmic complexity vulnerabilities. NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including 1.26.0 is vulnerable to some of them. TagTrap, where the triple(Zone, Algo, KeyTag) matching mechanism introduces a significant attack vector when resolvers handle malicious responses containing numerous mismatched DNSKEY, RRSIG, and DS record. DelegationTrap, where constructing the chain-of-trust requires iterative validation of DNSKEY and DS records from the root zone downward. For deeply nested domains, this results in significant computational overhead. NsecTrap, where responses with excessive invalid NSEC records compel the resolver to validate each one. AdditionalTrap, where Unbound by default would try to DNSSEC validate the ADDITIONAL section as well. This can be exploited to waste validation resources by malicious users.
CVSS Score
5.3
EPSS Score
0.005
Published
2026-09-16
NLnet Labs Unbound 1.22.0 up to and including 1.26.1, has a use-after-free vulnerability when compiled for DNS-over-QUIC support with '--with-libngtcp2'. Each DoQ stream owns an output buffer that holds the DNS response. ngtcp2's retransmission buffer keeps a shallow pointer into the output buffer for as long as a STREAM frame may be resent. On a client RESET_STREAM, the output buffer is freed but ngtcp2 still holds the matching retransmission entries. The next PTO timeout makes ngtcp2 re-encode the STREAM frame and copy from the freed buffer. A malicious actor that can query Unbound over DoQ and that withholds ACKs, sends RESET_STREAM, and waits for PTO, reaches this use-after-free with no privilege. This leads to retransmissions against freed memory and eventually an abnormal server exit under a 20-query spray.
CVSS Score
6.5
EPSS Score
0.003
Published
2026-09-16
In NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.1, when the validator builds the canonical RDATA form for an RRSIG-covered PX/RP/MINFO/SOA RRset, it computes the address of the second embedded domain name as 'datstart + dname_valid(datstart, ...)' and passes it straight to 'query_dname_tolower()' without checking that a second name is actually present in the RDATA. The wire-format parser accepts multi-dname RRs whose RDATA ends after the first name, so an attacker who runs a DNSSEC-signed authoritative server can deliver a record with an absent second domain name (e.g. SOA record) and cause 'query_dname_tolower()' to walk label-by-label through stale bytes in the per-worker 'env->scratch_buffer', past the end of that heap allocation if 'msg-buffer-size' has been lowered from the default. This leads to heap buffer overflow and on a release build the outcome relies heavily on the contents of the buffer tail and the adjacent heap chunk.
CVSS Score
4.8
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2026-07-22
In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.20.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when Unbound is configured with 'serve-expired: yes' and 'serve-expired-client-timeout > discard-timeout > 0' (contrary to the suggested values), the discard-timeout branch during the serve expired logic drops an aged client reply without performing the correct accounting for the number of reply addresses for the query. Other identical branches outside of serve expired perform the correct decrement. Since the counter is never decremented in such scenario, it can reach the maximum limit and new clients for duplicate in-flight queries are silently dropped resulting in degradation of resolution service. A malicious actor can exploit the vulnerability by querying the resolver for a client-controlled slow-on-demand authoritative zone that can drive the counter past the threshold. Shipped defaults for 'serve-expired-client-timeout: 1800' and 'discard-timeout: 1900' make the branch unreachable.
CVSS Score
5.9
EPSS Score
0.004
Published
2026-07-22
In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.18.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when Unbound listens on a 'proxy-protocol-port' interface with 'answer-cookie: yes', the RFC 9018 server-cookie SipHash is computed over the proxy's wire address instead of the PROXYv2-declared client. One server cookie obtained through a given proxy node therefore validates for every PROXYv2-declared source behind that node. On a UDP+proxy-protocol front, an off-path attacker can harvest one cookie with a single legitimate query, then replay it under any spoofed source and pass DNS Cookie checks that were deployed to defeat this in the first place.
CVSS Score
3.7
EPSS Score
0.002
Published
2026-07-22
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