CVE-2026-44390

Unbounded name compression in certain cases causes degradation of service

Published May 20, 2026 CVSS 4.0 · 6.9 Medium EPSS < 1% KEV · Not listed
Description
NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 has a vulnerability when handling replies with very large RRsets that Unbound needs to perform name compression for. Malicious upstream responses with very large RRsets with records that don't share a suffix above the root can cause Unbound to spend a considerable time applying name compression to downstream replies. This can lead to degraded performance and eventually denial of service in well orchestrated attacks. An adversary can exploit the vulnerability by querying Unbound for the specially crafted contents of a malicious zone with very large RRsets. Before Unbound replies to the query it will try to apply name compression which was an unbounded operation that could lock the CPU until the whole packet was complete. A compression limit was introduced in 1.21.1 for this but it didn't account for the case where records would not share any suffix above the root. That causes Unbound to go in a different code path because of the compression tree lookup failure and eventually not increment the compression counter for those operations. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix that increments the compression counter regardless of the compression tree lookup. This is a complement fix to CVE-2024-8508.

Remediation

Vendor Solution

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.25.1

Tracking

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Advisories

Source ID Title
Debian DSA Debian DSA DSA-6304-1 unbound security update
Ubuntu USN Ubuntu USN USN-8282-1 Unbound vulnerabilities
History
Type Values Removed Values Added
First Time appeared Nlnetlabs
Nlnetlabs unbound
CPEs cpe:2.3:a:nlnetlabs:unbound:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
Vendors & Products Nlnetlabs
Nlnetlabs unbound
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 5.3, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L'}

Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'yes', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'partial'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 has a vulnerability when handling replies with very large RRsets that Unbound needs to perform name compression for. Malicious upstream responses with very large RRsets with records that don't share a suffix above the root can cause Unbound to spend a considerable time applying name compression to downstream replies. This can lead to degraded performance and eventually denial of service in well orchestrated attacks. An adversary can exploit the vulnerability by querying Unbound for the specially crafted contents of a malicious zone with very large RRsets. Before Unbound replies to the query it will try to apply name compression which was an unbounded operation that could lock the CPU until the whole packet was complete. A compression limit was introduced in 1.21.1 for this but it didn't account for the case where records would not share any suffix above the root. That causes Unbound to go in a different code path because of the compression tree lookup failure and eventually not increment the compression counter for those operations. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix that increments the compression counter regardless of the compression tree lookup. This is a complement fix to CVE-2024-8508.
Title Unbounded name compression in certain cases causes degradation of service
Weaknesses CWE-407
References
Metrics cvssV4_0

{'score': 6.9, 'vector': 'CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/U:Amber'}

Weaknesses

Sources

Status
PUBLISHED
Assigner
NLnet Labs
Published
Updated
Sep 1, 2026, 12:04 PM
Reserved
May 7, 2026, 10:07 AM
Status
Modified
Published
May 20, 2026, 10:16 AM
Modified
Sep 1, 2026, 1:19 PM