Packet of death for a DNSCrypt misconfigured Unbound (NLnet Labs Unbound)

CVE-2026-55990
MEDIUM 5.9

At a glance

Source
NVD
EPSS
EPSS 0.25 % Β· percentile 16 ()
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
NLnet Labs
NVD status
Analyzed

Description

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.7.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when the 'dnscrypt:' clause lists more 'dnscrypt-provider-cert:' files than there are matching 'dnscrypt-secret-key:' files, Unbound fills only the matched prefix and leaves the tail slots at the '0xdb' fill that libsodium's allocator writes into every allocation. Unbound would then iterate over the number of cert files, not the actual slots, so it walks into a slot with garbage data filled with '0xdb' bytes. Any unauthenticated client that sends one UDP datagram of β‰₯ 68 bytes whose first 8 bytes are '0xdb' to 'dnscrypt-port' will use that garbage entry which leads to a garbage dereference killing the server. This is a silent faulty configuration that goes unnoticed until triggered with the right client query. Unbound needs to be compiled with DNSCrypt support ('--enable-dnscrypt').

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-457 β€” Use of Uninitialized Variable

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HNLnet Labs
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HNVD Β· sep@nlnetlabs.nl (Secondary)

European references

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
NLnet Labs Β· Unboundaffected 1.7.0 < 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