CVE-2026-77955 PUBLISHED

Possible ZONEMD verification bypass window

Assigner: NLnet Labs
Reserved: 07.09.2026 Published: 16.09.2026 Updated: 16.09.2026

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.13.2 up to and including 1.26.1, a vulnerability in ZONEMD configured zones (zonemd-check: yes) which are located below (but not at) a trust anchor allow for an attack window where (tampered with) zone contents are served (or stored to disk) prior to the ZONEMD integrity check. This is caused by the needed DS/DNSKEY asynchronous resolution that needs to happen before the ZONEMD check completes. If a zonefile is written to disk (zonefile: option) while the ZONEMD check failed, the tampered data are reloaded on startup and available until ZONEMD verification concludes again. If verification fails, the data is not served any more but still persists on disk for future reloads.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
CVSS Score: 4.4

'zonemd-check: yes' configured for authoritative zones

Product Status

Vendor NLnet Labs
Product Unbound
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.13.2 to 1.26.1 (excl.)

Solutions

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.26.1

Credits

  • Yuqi Qiu (Nankai University, AOSP Lab) finder
  • Xiang Li (Nankai University, AOSP Lab) finder
  • Qifan Zhang (Palo Alto Networks) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-345: Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity CWE