CVE-2022-38177: Memory leak in ECDSA DNSSEC verification code

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 3.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2022-09-21 · updated 2026-09-01
Weakness: CWE-401

Description

By spoofing the target resolver with responses that have a malformed ECDSA signature, an attacker can trigger a small memory leak. It is possible to gradually erode available memory to the point where named crashes for lack of resources.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 10.0, 11.0
Fedoraproject Fedora: 35, 36, 37
ISC BIND: from 9.8.4 through 9.16.32; 9.9.3-s1, 9.9.12-s1, 9.9.13-s1, 9.10.5-s1, 9.10.7-s1, 9.11.3-s1 (+19)
Active IQ Unified Manager for VMware vSphere, Linux, and Microsoft Windows: all versions

References

http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2022/09/21/3
https://kb.isc.org/docs/cve-2022-38177
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/10/msg00007.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/CV4GQWBPF7Y52J2FA24U6UMHQAOXZEF7/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/MRHB6J4Z7BKH4HPEKG5D35QGRD6ANNMT/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/YZJQNUASODNVAWZV6STKG5SD6XIJ446S/
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202210-25
https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20221228-0010/
https://www.debian.org/security/2022/dsa-5235
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2022/09/21/3
https://kb.isc.org/docs/cve-2022-38177
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/10/msg00007.html

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