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National Vulnerability Database

National Vulnerability Database

NVD

National Vulnerability Database
  1. Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-44390 Detail

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.


Metrics

 
NVD enrichment efforts reference publicly available information to associate vector strings. CVSS information contributed by other sources is also displayed.
CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

Nist CVSS score does not match with CNA score
CNA:  NLnet Labs
CVSS-B 6.9 MEDIUM
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

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

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URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-44390.txt NLnet Labs

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source
CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity NLnet Labs  

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2026-44390
NVD Published Date:
05/20/2026
NVD Last Modified:
05/20/2026
Source:
NLnet Labs