CVE-2026-42944 PUBLISHED

Heap overflow with multiple NSID, COOKIE, PADDING EDNS options

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

NLnet Labs Unbound 1.14.0 up to and including version 1.25.0 has a vulnerability that results in heap overflow when encoding multiple NSID and/or DNS Cookie EDNS and/or EDNS Padding options in the reply packet. The relevant options ('nsid', 'answer-cookie', 'pad-responses' (default)) need to be enabled for the vulnerability to be exploited. An adversary who can query Unbound can exploit the vulnerability by attaching multiple NSID and/or DNS Cookie EDNS and/or EDNS Padding options to the query. A flaw in the size calculation of the EDNS field truncates the correct value which allows the encoder to overflow the available space when writing. Those two combined lead to a heap overflow write of Unbound controlled data and eventually a crash. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to de-duplicate the EDNS options and a fix to prevent truncation of the EDNS field size calculation.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/U:Red
CVSS Score: 8.7

Product Status

Vendor NLnet Labs
Product Unbound
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.14.0 to 1.25.1 (excl.)

Solutions

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.25.1

Credits

  • Qifan Zhang (Palo Alto Networks) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-197: Numeric Truncation Error CWE
  • CWE-787: Out-of-bounds Write CWE