Packet of death with DNSCrypt (NLnet Labs Unbound)

CVE-2026-32792
MEDIUM 4.6

At a glance

Source
NVD
EPSS
EPSS 0.34 % · percentile 27 ()
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
NLnet Labs
NVD status
Analyzed

Description

NLnet Labs Unbound 1.6.2 up to and including version 1.25.0 has a denial of service vulnerability when compiled with DNSCrypt support ('--enable-dnscrypt'). A bad DNSCrypt query could underflow Unbound's DNSCrypt packet reading procedure that may lead to heap overflow. A malicious actor can exploit the vulnerability with a single bad DNSCrypt query that its decrypted plaintext consists entirely of '0x00' bytes and does not contain the expected '0x80' marker. Unbound would then start reading more bytes than necessary until it finds a non-'0x00' byte. Based on the underlying memory allocator and the memory layout, it could lead to heap overflow while reading followed by a crash. Likelihood of a crash is low, since it relies heavily on the underlying memory allocator and the memory layout. If the heap overflow does not happen, Unbound's later packet checks will deny the packet. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to bound reading in the given buffer space.

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-166 — Improper Handling of Missing Special Element
  • CWE-125 — Out-of-bounds Read

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 4.0MEDIUM 4.6CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U/U:GreenNLnet Labs
CVSS 4.0MEDIUM 4.6CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:GreenNVD · sep@nlnetlabs.nl (Secondary)
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.3CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:LNVD · nvd@nist.gov (Primary)

European references

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
NLnet Labs · Unboundaffected 1.6.2 < 1.25.1

Sources

SourceLicence
CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5)CVE Program Terms of Use
EPSS (FIRST.org)FIRST — attribution requested
ENISA EUVDENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged
NVD (NIST) via fkie-cad/nvd-json-data-feedsPublic domain — this product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD