CVE-2018-5738

Some versions of BIND can improperly permit recursive query service to unauthorized clients

At a glance

Severity
MEDIUM 5.3
EPSS
EPSS 11.16 % · percentile 96 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
isc
NVD status
Modified

Description

Change #4777 (introduced in October 2017) introduced an unforeseen issue in releases which were issued after that date, affecting which clients are permitted to make recursive queries to a BIND nameserver. The intended (and documented) behavior is that if an operator has not specified a value for the "allow-recursion" setting, it SHOULD default to one of the following: none, if "recursion no;" is set in named.conf; a value inherited from the "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" settings IF "recursion yes;" (the default for that setting) AND match lists are explicitly set for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" (see the BIND9 Administrative Reference Manual section 6.2 for more details); or the intended default of "allow-recursion {localhost; localnets;};" if "recursion yes;" is in effect and no values are explicitly set for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query". However, because of the regression introduced by change #4777, it is possible when "recursion yes;" is in effect and no match list values are provided for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" for the setting of "allow-recursion" to inherit a setting of all hosts from the "allow-query" setting default, improperly permitting recursion to all clients. Affects BIND 9.9.12, 9.10.7, 9.11.3, 9.12.0->9.12.1-P2, the development release 9.13.0, and also releases 9.9.12-S1, 9.10.7-S1, 9.11.3-S1, and 9.11.3-S2 from BIND 9 Supported Preview Edition.

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.0MEDIUM 5.3CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:Nisc
CVSS 3.0MEDIUM 5.3CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:NNVD · security-officer@isc.org (Secondary)
CVSS 3.0HIGH 7.5CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:NNVD · nvd@nist.gov (Primary)
CVSS 2.0MEDIUM 5.0AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:NNVD · nvd@nist.gov (Primary)

Weaknesses (CWE)

European references

CERT-FR advisories

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
ISC · BIND 9affected 9.9.12, 9.10.7, 9.11.3, 9.12.0->9.12.1-P2, the development release 9.13.0, and also releases 9.9.12-S1, 9.10.7-S1, 9.11.3-S1, and 9.11.3-S2 from BIND 9 Supported Preview Edition.

References

Sources

SourceLicence
CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5)CVE Program Terms of Use
EPSS (FIRST.org)FIRST — attribution requested
ENISA EUVDENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged
CERT-FR (ANSSI)Licence Ouverte / Etalab 2.0
NVD (NIST) via fkie-cad/nvd-json-data-feedsPublic domain — this product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD