Last updated 22 May 2026

A multi-vendor cache poisoning vulnerability named 'Rebirthday Attack' has been discovered in caching resolvers that support EDNS Client Subnet (ECS). Unbound is also vulnerable when compiled with ECS support, i.e., '--enable-subnet', AND configured to send ECS information along with queries to upstream name servers, i.e., at least one of the 'send-client-subnet', 'client-subnet-zone' or 'client-subnet-always-forward' options is used. Resolvers supporting ECS need to segregate outgoing queries to accommodate for different outgoing ECS information. This re-opens up resolvers to a birthday paradox attack (Rebirthday Attack) that tries to match the DNS transaction ID in order to cache non-ECS poisonous replies.

A vulnerability was found in Unbound that results in heap overflow when encoding multiple NSID and/or DNS Cookie EDNS and/or EDNS Padding options in the reply packet. The relevant options ('nsid', 'answer-cookie', 'pad-responses' (default)) need to be enabled for the vulnerability to be exploited.

Unbound 1.25.1 includes a fix to de-duplicate the EDNS options and a fix to prevent truncation of the EDNS field size calculation that also contributes to the heap overflow.

Access of Uninitialized Pointer vulnerability in the DNSSEC validator of the Unbound DNS resolver. The flaw is caused by the use of incorrect counters when calculating write offsets for ADDITIONAL section rrsets in chase-reply messages. DNAME duplication can increase the ANSWER section count and authority filtering can decrease the AUTHORITY section count, creating an uninitialized array slot. The validator later dereferences this uninitialized pointer, causing an immediate process crash. An adversary controlling a DNSSEC-signed domain can trigger this bug with a single query by configuring a DNAME chain with unsigned CNAMEs and a response containing unsigned AUTHORITY records alongside signed ADDITIONAL glue records.

When Routinator encounters a file via RRDP using a specifically crafted Document Type Definition, Routinator crashes.

Routinator exits on any error when accepting incoming HTTP or RTR connections, including ones it can recover from such as running out of file descriptors. This condition can be triggered maliciously by an attacker by opening a large number of connections to the HTTP or RTR server.

This only affects users that make their HTTP or RTR server available to untrusted networks.

Last updated 29 June 2026

Routinator does not properly check the module component of rsync URIs, which are used to create the file system paths for the Routinator cache. This allows for path traversal by having a module name containing .., potentially providing an attacker access to the entire Routinator rsync cache.

When sending a specifically crafted non-UTF-8 string as select-asn query parameter to the /api/v1/origins endpoint, Routinator crashes.

This only affects users who allow API access from untrusted networks.

Insufficient verification that responses belong to a query

Due to a mistake in error checking, Routinator will terminate when an incoming RTR connection is reset by the peer too quickly after opening.

The initial code parsing the manifest did not check the content of the file names yet later code assumed that it was checked and panicked when encountering illegal characters, resulting in a crash of Routinator.

Cross-zone wildcard cache poisoning via RRSIG.labels manipulation

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.22.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when downstream DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) is enabled, the first two bidirectional streams on a new QUIC connection (streamid 0 and 4) bypass the per-stream 'quic-size' gate entirely, and large input buffers are allocated later, after only the 2-byte length prefix has been received from the initial streams. As a result, a remote client can make Unbound exceed the configured 'quic-size' limit with low-cost input. Using only one connection and two streams, each sending a declared 65535-byte length prefix and then holding the streams open, a client can already trivially make Unbound roughly allocate double that amount. This is a remote availability issue / memory-accounting bypass in the downstream DoQ implementation that leads to denial of service for new DoQ clients. This vulnerability needs Unbound to be compiled with DoQ support ('--with-libngtcp2') and the 'quic-port' to be configured for the listening interfaces.

In Unbound 1.9.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when a DNSCrypt query is received over TCP, the routine that encrypts the reply in place fails to bound the reply length against the destination buffer size. The size clamp that protects the UDP path is not applied on the TCP path, so a reply larger than 65504 bytes is shifted forward by 48 bytes inside a buffer of capacity equal to 'msg-buffer-size', writing past the end of the heap allocation. A single malicious encrypted query crashes the resolver and lead to denial of service. This vulnerability needs Unbound to be compiled with DNSCrypt support ('--enable-dnscrypt') and the 'dnscrypt:' clause to be configured and enabled for the listening interfaces.

'dns-error-reporting: yes' leads to stack buffer overflow

Net::DNS before 0.60, a Perl module, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (stack consumption) via a malformed compressed DNS packet with self-referencing pointers, which triggers an infinite loop.

A multi-vendor cache poisoning vulnerability named 'Rebirthday Attack' has been discovered in caching resolvers that support EDNS Client Subnet (ECS). Unbound is also vulnerable when compiled with ECS support, i.e., '--enable-subnet', AND configured to send ECS information along with queries to upstream name servers, i.e., at least one of the 'send-client-subnet', 'client-subnet-zone' or 'client-subnet-always-forward' options is used. Resolvers supporting ECS need to segregate outgoing queries to accommodate for different outgoing ECS information. This re-opens up resolvers to a birthday paradox attack (Rebirthday Attack) that tries to match the DNS transaction ID in order to cache non-ECS poisonous replies.

In validaterrset() at dnssec.c:546, siglen is calculated as rdlen - (p - psav) without checking that rdlen is large enough to cover the fixed RRSIG fields and signer name. A crafted RRSIG with a short rdlen makes siglen go negative, which when passed as a size parameter becomes a huge unsigned value, causing a massive heap OOB read. Fix: check siglen <= 0 and return STATBOGUS before using it.

NSEC/NSEC3 bitmap window iteration in dnssec.c advances by p[1] instead of p[1] + 2, missing the 2-byte window header. When bitmaplength=0, neither rdlen nor p change, creating an infinite loop. Two instances at dnssec.c:1290 and dnssec.c:1450. Reachable before RRSIG validation so no valid signatures are needed. One of the two sites was coincidentally fixed in 2.92. Fix: add +2 to both the pointer advance and rdlen decrement.

Access of Uninitialized Pointer vulnerability in the DNSSEC validator of the Unbound DNS resolver. The flaw is caused by the use of incorrect counters when calculating write offsets for ADDITIONAL section rrsets in chase-reply messages. DNAME duplication can increase the ANSWER section count and authority filtering can decrease the AUTHORITY section count, creating an uninitialized array slot. The validator later dereferences this uninitialized pointer, causing an immediate process crash. An adversary controlling a DNSSEC-signed domain can trigger this bug with a single query by configuring a DNAME chain with unsigned CNAMEs and a response containing unsigned AUTHORITY records alongside signed ADDITIONAL glue records.

Use After Free vulnerability in the DNSSEC validator of the Unbound DNS resolver. The flaw is caused by a struct-assignment bug during deep-copying of response messages when DS sub-queries need to suspend validation due to NSEC3 computational budget exhaustion (introduced in Unbound 1.19.1). The deep-copy operation overwrites the destination's rrsets pointer with the source's pointer. After the sub-query region is freed, the resumed validator dereferences this dangling pointer, triggering a crash or potentially enabling arbitrary code execution. An adversary can exploit this vulnerability by controlling a malicious DNSSEC-signed zone and querying a vulnerable Unbound instance.

A vulnerability was found in Unbound that results in heap overflow when encoding multiple NSID and/or DNS Cookie EDNS and/or EDNS Padding options in the reply packet. The relevant options ('nsid', 'answer-cookie', 'pad-responses' (default)) need to be enabled for the vulnerability to be exploited.

Unbound 1.25.1 includes a fix to de-duplicate the EDNS options and a fix to prevent truncation of the EDNS field size calculation that also contributes to the heap overflow.

NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 is vulnerable to a degradation of service attack related to parsing long lists of incoming EDNS options. An adversary sending queries with too many EDNS options can hold Unbound threads hostage while they are parsing and creating internal data structures for the options. Coordinated attacks can result in degradation and/or denial of service. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to limit acceptable incoming EDNS options (100).

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.

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.

NLnet Labs ldns 1.2.0 up to and including versions 1.9.0, when used in applications as (stub) resolver over UDP, lacks matching the query destination address and port with the response source address and port. Furthermore not the query ID, neither the question of the query is matched with that of the response. This makes applications, that use ldns for (stub) resolver functionality over UDP, vulnerable for off-path poisoning attacks. The drill tool, which is shipped with ldns, suffers from this vulnerability.

When 'dns-error-reporting: yes' is set, the EDNS Report-Channel option (code 18) from the last upstream response is read and uses the option's length as the length of the agent domain. When a domain name check is performed on the agent domain, the returned length is not used and if the agent domain is followed by garbage, those bytes are moved onto the tail of the synthetic 'er.' report query name. That query name is later used in the iterator via a subquery to send out the DNS Error Report and when Unbound tries to walk that query name during 'findclosestoftype()', it strips labels using the query name length rather than stopping at the embedded root, walks one byte past it, and feeds the first garbage byte to 'dnamequeryhash()' as a label length writing over the stack variable 'labuf'. One ordinary upstream response from a delegated zone the attacker controls is sufficient to terminate the daemon. Unbound 1.25.2 includes a fix to use the proper length of the agent domain name instead of the EDNS option length one.

Unbound before 1.10.1 has an infinite loop via malformed DNS answers received from upstream servers.

References: http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/05/19/5 https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2020-126622020-12663.txt

Last updated 21 May 2026