REDHAT-BUG-2480131: 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 in the jostle logic that could defeat its purpose and degrade resolution performance. Retransmits of the same query could renew the age of slow running queries and not allow the jostle logic to see them as aged and potential targets for replacement with new queries. An adversary who can query a vulnerable Unbound and who can control a domain name server that replies slowly and/or maliciously to Unbound's queries can exploit the vulnerability and degrade the resolution performance of Unbound. When Unbound's 'num-queries-per-thread' reaches its limit, the jostle logic kicks in. When a new query comes in, half of the available queries that are also slow to resolve are candidates for replacement. The vulnerability then happens because duplicate queries that need resolution would skew the aging result by using the timestamp of the latest duplicate query instead of the original one that started the resolution effort. Cache and local data response performance remains unaffected. Coordinated attacks could raise this to a denial of resolution service. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to attach an initial, non-updatable start time for incoming queries that allow the jostle logic to work as intended.

Affected Software

1 affected component
Nlnet Labs Unbound<=1.25.0

Remediation

Recommended actions to resolve this vulnerability, in priority order.

  1. Upgrade

    Upgrade Unbound to a version that resolves this vulnerability.

    Fixed in 1.25.1
  2. Compensating control

    If possible under your deployment, limit the ability for an attacker to control or influence authoritative DNS responses to Unbound (e.g., prevent untrusted/malicious slow responders from affecting Unbound’s query targets) to reduce the likelihood of triggering the jostle-related resolution performance degradation.

Event History

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

Contact

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