Degradation of resolution service when 'discard-timeout' and 'serve-expired-client-timeout' are combined in unusual configuration (NLnet Labs Unbound)

CVE-2026-56444
MEDIUM 5.9

At a glance

Source
NVD
EPSS
EPSS 0.36 % · percentile 30 ()
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
NLnet Labs
NVD status
Undergoing Analysis

Description

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.20.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when Unbound is configured with 'serve-expired: yes' and 'serve-expired-client-timeout > discard-timeout > 0' (contrary to the suggested values), the discard-timeout branch during the serve expired logic drops an aged client reply without performing the correct accounting for the number of reply addresses for the query. Other identical branches outside of serve expired perform the correct decrement. Since the counter is never decremented in such scenario, it can reach the maximum limit and new clients for duplicate in-flight queries are silently dropped resulting in degradation of resolution service. A malicious actor can exploit the vulnerability by querying the resolver for a client-controlled slow-on-demand authoritative zone that can drive the counter past the threshold. Shipped defaults for 'serve-expired-client-timeout: 1800' and 'discard-timeout: 1900' make the branch unreachable.

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-772 — Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HNLnet Labs
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HNVD · sep@nlnetlabs.nl (Secondary)

European references

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
NLnet Labs · Unboundaffected 1.20.0 < 1.25.2

Sources

SourceLicence
CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5)CVE Program Terms of Use
EPSS (FIRST.org)FIRST — attribution requested
ENISA EUVDENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged
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