CVE-2026-44390

NameCVE-2026-44390
DescriptionNLnet 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.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)
ReferencesDSA-6304-1
Debian Bugs1137187

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
unbound (PTS)bullseye1.13.1-1+deb11u2vulnerable
bullseye (security)1.13.1-1+deb11u7vulnerable
bookworm1.17.1-2+deb12u4vulnerable
bookworm (security)1.17.1-2+deb12u3vulnerable
trixie1.22.0-2+deb13u2vulnerable
trixie (security)1.22.0-2+deb13u3fixed
forky, sid1.25.1-1fixed

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
unboundsourcetrixie1.22.0-2+deb13u3DSA-6304-1
unboundsource(unstable)1.25.1-11137187

Notes

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/05/20/5
https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-44390.txt

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