What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-31498: c-ares has a use-after-free in read_answers()

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.3 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-04-08 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-416

Description

c-ares is an asynchronous resolver library. From 1.32.3 through 1.34.4, there is a use-after-free in read_answers() when process_answer() may re-enqueue a query either due to a DNS Cookie Failure or when the upstream server does not properly support EDNS, or possibly on TCP queries if the remote closed the connection immediately after a response. If there was an issue trying to put that new transaction on the wire, it would close the connection handle, but read_answers() was still expecting the connection handle to be available to possibly dequeue other responses. In theory a remote attacker might be able to trigger this by flooding the target with ICMP UNREACHABLE packets if they also control the upstream nameserver and can return a result with one of those conditions, this has been untested. Otherwise only a local attacker might be able to change system behavior to make send()/write() return a failure condition. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.34.5.

Affected products

• c-ares: from 1.32.3, < 1.34.5

References

• https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/commit/29d38719112639d8c0ba910254a3dd4f482ea2d1
• https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/pull/821
• https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/security/advisories/GHSA-6hxc-62jh-p29v
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/04/08/3

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