CVE-2026-32665 PUBLISHED

Remote DNS-over-QUIC denial of service due to `quic-size` budget bypass

Assigner: NLnet Labs
Reserved: 07.05.2026 Published: 22.07.2026 Updated: 22.07.2026

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 (stream_id 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.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS Score: 7.5

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

  • N0zoM1z0 (GitHub user) finder
  • Kunta Chu (Tsinghua University) finder
  • Kaihua Wang (Tsinghua University) finder
  • Jianjun Chen (Tsinghua University) finder
  • Qifan Zhang (Palo Alto Networks) finder
  • Xuanchao Xie finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-1284: Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input CWE