CVE-2026-32792 PUBLISHED

Packet of death with DNSCrypt

Assigner: NLnet Labs
Reserved: 07.05.2026 Published: 20.05.2026 Updated: 20.05.2026

NLnet Labs Unbound 1.6.2 up to and including version 1.25.0 has a denial of service vulnerability when compiled with DNSCrypt support ('--enable-dnscrypt'). A bad DNSCrypt query could underflow Unbound's DNSCrypt packet reading procedure that may lead to heap overflow. A malicious actor can exploit the vulnerability with a single bad DNSCrypt query that its decrypted plaintext consists entirely of '0x00' bytes and does not contain the expected '0x80' marker. Unbound would then start reading more bytes than necessary until it finds a non-'0x00' byte. Based on the underlying memory allocator and the memory layout, it could lead to heap overflow while reading followed by a crash. Likelihood of a crash is low, since it relies heavily on the underlying memory allocator and the memory layout. If the heap overflow does not happen, Unbound's later packet checks will deny the packet. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to bound reading in the given buffer space.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U/U:Green
CVSS Score: 4.6

Compiled with DNSCrypt

Product Status

Vendor NLnet Labs
Product Unbound
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.6.2 to 1.25.1 (excl.)

Solutions

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.25.1

Credits

  • Andrew Griffiths (calif.io) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-166: Improper Handling of Missing Special Element CWE
  • CWE-125: Out-of-bounds Read CWE