Degradation of resolution service from improperly accounted client-terminated DNS-over-QUIC queries (NLnet Labs Unbound)

CVE-2026-41637
LOW 3.7

At a glance

Source
NVD
EPSS
EPSS 0.37 % Β· percentile 31 ()
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
NLnet Labs
NVD status
Analyzed

Description

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.22.0 up to and including 1.25.1, client terminated DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) queries are not accounted properly by Unbound resulting in low-cost inflation of the waiting number of replies for already in-flight resolution queries. This results in degradation of resolution service for new clients for already in-flight queries. A malicious actor can exploit the vulnerability by issuing DoQ queries for query names that need resolution and proceeding on immediately terminating the query by one of STOP_SENDING/RESET_STREAM/CONNECTION_CLOSE QUIC frames. Those terminated DoQ queries are not properly counted for and keep inflating the number of waiting replies for in-flight queries. When the maximum is reached, it results in silent query drops for new clients needing resolution for already in-flight queries. This vulnerability needs Unbound to be compiled with DoQ support ('--with-libngtcp2') and the 'quic-port' to be configured for the listening interfaces. Additionally, a malicious actor needs access to multiple source IPs to bypass the by-default configured 'wait-limit' option.

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-772 β€” Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1LOW 3.7CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:LNLnet Labs
CVSS 3.1LOW 3.7CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:LNVD Β· sep@nlnetlabs.nl (Secondary)

European references

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
NLnet Labs Β· Unboundaffected 1.22.0 < 1.25.2

Sources

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