CVE-2026-96405 PUBLISHED

Aggregate DNS name chained pointer decompression work leads to degradation of service.

Assigner: NLnet Labs
Reserved: 14.10.2026 Published: 21.10.2026 Updated: 21.10.2026

NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.26.1 limits compression-pointer traversal for each individual domain-name operation but has no aggregate inbound decompression-work budget. Many chained compression pointers in a message results in a lot of CPU usage following them. A malicious actor with recursive-query access and control of an ordinarily delegated authority that serves specially crafted replies can exploit the vulnerability and degrade Unbound's general performance.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS Score: 5.3

Product Status

Vendor NLnet Labs
Product Unbound
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 1.26.2 (excl.)

Solutions

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.26.2

Credits

  • Yuheng Zhang (Tsinghua University & Jingxian Technology Co., Ltd.) finder
  • Jianjun Chen (Tsinghua University) finder
  • Zihan Wang (Z.AI Co., Ltd.) finder
  • Kaiwen Shen (CloudItera) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling CWE