CVE-2026-44390

May 20, 2026, 10:52 p.m.

6.9
Medium

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.

Product(s) Impacted

Vendor Product Versions
Nlnetlabs
  • Unbound
  • *

Weaknesses

Common security weaknesses mapped to this vulnerability.

CWE-407
Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity
An algorithm in a product has an inefficient worst-case computational complexity that may be detrimental to system performance and can be triggered by an attacker, typically using crafted manipulations that ensure that the worst case is being reached.

*CPE(s)

Affected systems and software identified for this CVE.

Type Vendor Product Version Update Edition Language Software Edition Target Software Target Hardware Other Information
a nlnetlabs unbound / / / / / / / /

References

https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-44390.txt

Tags

[email protected]
CWE-407
2026-05-20
CVE-2026-44390

CVSS Score

6.9 / 10

CVSS Data - 4.0

  • Attack Vector: NETWORK
  • Attack Complexity: LOW
  • Attack Requirements: NONE
  • Privileges Required: NONE
  • User Interaction: NONE
  • Scope:
  • Confidentiality Impact: NONE
  • Integrity Impact: NONE
  • Availability Impact: LOW
  • Exploit Maturity: NOT_DEFINED

    • 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/E:X/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:Amber

    View Vector String

Timeline

Published: May 20, 2026, 10:16 a.m.
Last Modified: May 20, 2026, 10:52 p.m.

Status : Analyzed

CVE has been recently published to the CVE List and has been received by the NVD.

More info

Source

[email protected]

*Disclaimer: Some vulnerabilities do not have an associated CPE. To enhance the data, we use AI to infer CPEs based on CVE details. This is an automated process and might not always be accurate.