CVE-2026-44690 PUBLISHED

Cross-zone wildcard cache poisoning via RRSIG.labels manipulation

Assigner: NLnet Labs
Reserved: 22.06.2026 Published: 22.07.2026 Updated: 22.07.2026

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.7.0 up to and including 1.25.1, insufficient validation of the RRSIG.Labels field combined with premature cache writes during RFC 8198 aggressive NSEC processing leads to cache poisoning that permits a malicious actor controlling a single delegated zone to poison arbitrary sibling zones under NSEC-signed parent domains. A malicious actor with one registered domain under an NSEC-signed TLD can serve malicious insecure DNS responses for unrelated sibling domains (sharing the same parent zone). Arbitrary delegations that do not exist under the parent domain and are covered by the parent's NSEC chain can be brought into insecure existence by fraudulent wildcard DS records (less labels than expected, unknown algorithm) from the malicious sibling domain. This allows the malicious actor to inject insecure wildcard records for those delegations.

Metrics

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

Product Status

Vendor NLnet Labs
Product Unbound
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.7.0 to 1.25.2 (excl.)

Solutions

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.25.2

Credits

  • Qifan Zhang (Palo Alto Networks) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-345: Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity CWE