REDHAT-BUG-2480130: High severity Nlnet Labs Unbound vulnerability

Published May 20, 2026
·
Updated

NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 has a vulnerability when handling replies with very large RRsets that Unbound needs to perform name compression for. Malicious upstream responses with very large RRsets with records that don't share a suffix above the root can cause Unbound to spend a considerable time applying name compression to downstream replies. This can lead to degraded performance and eventually denial of service in well orchestrated attacks. An adversary can exploit the vulnerability by querying Unbound for the specially crafted contents of a malicious zone with very large RRsets. Before Unbound replies to the query it will try to apply name compression which was an unbounded operation that could lock the CPU until the whole packet was complete. A compression limit was introduced in 1.21.1 for this but it didn't account for the case where records would not share any suffix above the root. That causes Unbound to go in a different code path because of the compression tree lookup failure and eventually not increment the compression counter for those operations. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix that increments the compression counter regardless of the compression tree lookup. This is a complement fix to CVE-2024-8508.

Affected Software

1 affected component
Nlnet Labs Unbound<=1.25.0

Remediation

Recommended actions to resolve this vulnerability, in priority order.

  1. Upgrade

    Upgrade NLnet Labs Unbound to a version that resolves this vulnerability.

    Fixed in 1.25.1

Event History

May 20, 2026
Data Sourced
via Red Hat·10:01 AM
DescriptionSeverityAffected Software
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Frequently Asked Questions

1

What is the severity of REDHAT-BUG-2480130?

The severity of REDHAT-BUG-2480130 is classified as high with a score of 7.

2

How does REDHAT-BUG-2480130 affect Nlnet Labs Unbound?

REDHAT-BUG-2480130 affects Nlnet Labs Unbound by allowing potential exploitation when handling malicious responses with very large RRsets.

3

What versions of Nlnet Labs Unbound are impacted by REDHAT-BUG-2480130?

Nlnet Labs Unbound versions up to and including 1.25.0 are impacted by REDHAT-BUG-2480130.

4

How do I fix REDHAT-BUG-2480130?

To fix REDHAT-BUG-2480130, upgrade Nlnet Labs Unbound to a version that addresses the vulnerability.

5

What type of vulnerabilities does REDHAT-BUG-2480130 represent?

REDHAT-BUG-2480130 represents a denial-of-service vulnerability related to DNS response handling.

Contact

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