CVE-2026-14586 PUBLISHED

Assertion in libngtcp2 when under pressure in high concurrency DNS-over-QUIC environments

Assigner: NLnet Labs
Reserved: 03.07.2026 Published: 22.07.2026 Updated: 22.07.2026

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.22.0 up to and including 1.25.1, in DNS-over-QUIC environments, with high concurrency and under pressure, an assertion in libngtcp2 about monotonic timestamps could trigger and result in server termination and thus denial of service. When interfacing with libngtcp2, for DNS-over-QUIC support in Unbound, it is expected to use monotonic time. Unbound was using realtime instead, and in DoQ environments with high concurrency and under pressure, an assert in libngtcp2 for the quic timestamp would trigger and terminate the server.This vulnerability needs Unbound to be compiled with DoQ support ('--with-libngtcp2') and the 'quic-port' to be configured for the listening interfaces.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS Score: 5.9

Unbound compiled with DoQ support ('--with-libngtcp2')

Product Status

Vendor NLnet Labs
Product Unbound
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.22.0 to 1.25.2 (excl.)

Solutions

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.25.2

Credits

  • Kunta Chu (Tsinghua University) finder
  • Kaihua Wang (Tsinghua University) finder
  • Jianjun Chen (Tsinghua University) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-617: Reachable Assertion CWE