CVE-2026-123602 PUBLISHED

Hickory DNS Recursor Ghost Domain Attack via Child-Side NS RRset Caching

Assigner: VulnCheck
Reserved: 06.11.2026 Published: 08.11.2026 Updated: 08.11.2026

The Hickory DNS recursor in all versions of hickory-recursor and in hickory-resolver 0.26.0-beta.1 before 0.26.2 (recursor feature) is vulnerable to ghost domain names attacks because it reuses child-side apex NS RRsets cached from zone NS queries for iterative resolution. By repeatedly querying a zone's NS records, an attacker keeps the stale RRset cached indefinitely, letting name servers whose delegation the parent revoked keep answering for the zone.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 8.2

Product Status

Vendor hickory-dns
Product hickory-dns
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 0.26.0-alpha.1 (incl.)
Vendor hickory-dns
Product hickory-dns
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0.26.0-beta.1 to 0.26.2 (excl.)
  • Version 0.26.2 is unaffected

Credits

  • qifan-sailboat reporter

References

Problem Types

  • Operation on a Resource after Expiration or Release CWE