Possible cache poisoning via promiscuous records for the authority section (NLnet Labs Unbound)

CVE-2026-42960
MEDIUM 5.7

At a glance

Source
NVD
EPSS
EPSS 0.26 % · percentile 18 ()
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
NLnet Labs
NVD status
Analyzed

Description

NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 is vulnerable to poisoning via promiscuous records for the authority section. Promiscuous RRSets that complement DNS replies in the authority section can be used to trick Unbound to cache such records. If an adversary is able to attach such records in a reply (i.e., spoofed packet, fragmentation attack) he would be able to poison Unbound's cache. A malicious actor can exploit the possible poisonous effect by injecting RRSets other than NS that are also accompanied by address records in a reply, for example MX. This could be achieved by trying to spoof a reply packet or fragmentation attacks. Unbound would then accept the relative address records in the additional section and cache them if the authority RRSet has enough trust at this point, i.e., in-zone data for the delegation point. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix that disregards address records from the additional section if they are not explicitly relevant only to authority NS records, mitigating the possible poison effect. This is a complement fix to CVE-2025-11411.

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-349 — Acceptance of Extraneous Untrusted Data With Trusted Data

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 4.0MEDIUM 5.7CVSS:4.0/AV:A/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:H/SA:H/E:P/U:AmberNLnet Labs
CVSS 4.0MEDIUM 5.7CVSS:4.0/AV:A/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:H/SA:H/E:P/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:AmberNVD · sep@nlnetlabs.nl (Secondary)
CVSS 3.1CRITICAL 10.0CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:H/A:HNVD · nvd@nist.gov (Primary)

European references

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
NLnet Labs · Unboundaffected 0 < 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