CVE-2026-35501 PUBLISHED

Bypass of a configured island trust anchor underneath an insecure parent from an atacker-controlled NSEC record.

Assigner: NLnet Labs
Reserved: 22.06.2026 Published: 21.10.2026 Updated: 21.10.2026

When NLnet Labs Unbound 1.0.1 up to and including version 1.26.1 is configured with both a root trust anchor and an additional 'trust-anchor:' for an island-of-security zone whose parent is provably insecure under the root chain, a malicious actor with a forged NSEC reply with the SOA bit cleared can trick Unbound to treat the configured trust island as insecure. This happens because the DNSSEC validator in Unbound accepts and caches the NSEC insecure response bypassing the RRSIG validation that the validator was supposed to do. The acceptance of the NSEC record at the trust anchor apex was allowed due to and old fix for type DS and NSEC queries from clients when trust anchor for that name existed.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
CVSS Score: 3.7

Product Status

Vendor NLnet Labs
Product Unbound
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.0.1 to 1.26.2 (excl.)

Solutions

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.26.2

Credits

  • Qifan Zhang (Palo Alto Networks) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-354: Improper Validation of Integrity Check Value CWE