Assertion failure in the DNS stub resolver with a long search domain
At a glance
Severity
MEDIUM 5.3
EPSS
EPSS 0.32 % · percentile 24 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
glibc
NVD status
Awaiting Analysis
Description
Initializing the DNS stub resolver from an /etc/resolv.conf file, or a LOCALDOMAIN environment variable, whose search list contains a domain of roughly 200 characters or more in the GNU C Library version 2.26 to 2.44 results in an assertion failure which aborts the process.
The resolver truncates the search list when copying it into the fixed-size _res.defdname buffer, then asserts that the copy is consistent with the full configuration. The consistency check compared against the wrong size and did not handle a first entry that does not fit, so a correctly truncated list failed the assertion. Any process that resolves names through the library is affected, including long-running processes that reload /etc/resolv.conf on the next query after it changes. Search domains are commonly written to /etc/resolv.conf from data received over DHCP or from a VPN server, so an attacker on the local network may be able to trigger this without privileges on the target system, subject to validation by the network configuration software.
