What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2018-5738: Some versions of BIND can improperly permit recursive query service to unauthorized clients
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.0)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 11.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2019-01-16 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-200
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.
Affected products
- Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 18.04
- ISC BIND: 9.9.12, 9.9.12-s1, 9.10.7, 9.10.7-s1, 9.11.3, 9.11.3-s1 (+11)
References
- http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041115
- https://kb.isc.org/docs/aa-01616
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201903-13
- https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190830-0002/
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3683-1/
- http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041115
- https://kb.isc.org/docs/aa-01616
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201903-13
- https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190830-0002/
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3683-1/
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