CVE-2026-52863 PUBLISHED

Memory corruption could lead to crash and denial of service

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

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.25.0 up to and including 1.25.1, a fix that makes the 'respip' and 'dns64' modules work together, creates a shallow copy of the view name in effect that could lead to memory corruption if the owner of the original view name is jostled out when Unbound is under pressure. Unbound needs to be configured with one of 'respip'/'rpz' modules, together with a module that can attach subqueries (respip CNAME redirection, dns64, subnetcache) and a configured 'access-control-view' while Unbound is under pressure so that joslte logic kicks in and starts dropping slow queries. The subquery is getting a shallow copy of the view name and if the super query which owns the view name is jostled out, memory corruption can occur. Likelihood of a crash is low, since it relies heavily on the underlying memory allocator and the memory layout. Debug memory builds (e.g., ASAN) that catch the free terminate the server.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS Score: 5.9

Product Status

Vendor NLnet Labs
Product Unbound
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.25.0 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-416: Use After Free CWE