CVE Watchtower

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CVE-2026-44390NVD

Vulnerability Summary

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.
Severity Level
UNKNOWN
Published Date
May 20, 2026
Last Modified
Sep 1, 2026
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation yet
EPSS Score (30-Day)
0.72%Probability
Root Weakness (CWE)
Refer to the official MITRE database for detailed architectural specifications regarding this weakness.
CVSS v4.0 Base Metrics — Score 6.9 (MEDIUM)
Attack VectorNetwork
Attack ComplexityLow
Attack RequirementsNone
Privileges RequiredNone
User InteractionNone
Confidentiality (Vulnerable System)None
Integrity (Vulnerable System)None
Availability (Vulnerable System)Low
Confidentiality (Subsequent System)None
Integrity (Subsequent System)None
Availability (Subsequent System)None

Affected & Patched Versions

Affected Versions
  • NLnet Labs Unbound < 1.25.1
Patched Versions
  • NLnet Labs Unbound 1.25.1
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