CVE-2026-42944
Medium
Elevated severity or exploit probability.
CVSS breakdown
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
| Attack Vector | N | Network |
| Attack Complexity | L | Low |
| Privileges Required | N | None |
| User Interaction | N | None |
| Scope | U | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | N | None |
| Integrity | N | None |
| Availability | H | High |
Timeline
- 2026-05-20 — Published (NVD)
- 2026-08-26 — Last modified (NVD)
Description
NLnet Labs Unbound 1.14.0 up to and including version 1.25.0 has a vulnerability that results in heap overflow when encoding multiple NSID and/or DNS Cookie EDNS and/or EDNS Padding options in the reply packet. The relevant options ('nsid', 'answer-cookie', 'pad-responses' (default)) need to be enabled for the vulnerability to be exploited. An adversary who can query Unbound can exploit the vulnerability by attaching multiple NSID and/or DNS Cookie EDNS and/or EDNS Padding options to the query. A flaw in the size calculation of the EDNS field truncates the correct value which allows the encoder to overflow the available space when writing. Those two combined lead to a heap overflow write of Unbound controlled data and eventually a crash. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to de-duplicate the EDNS options and a fix to prevent truncation of the EDNS field size calculation.
Affected
References
- https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-42944.txt
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:19752
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:23231
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:24365
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:24369
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-42944
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2479774
- https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-42944.json