What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-44687: Off-by-one error in 'harden-below-nxdomain' logic can shadow a stub/forward zone by a legitimate parent's NXDOMAIN
- Severity: low (CVSS 3.7 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-07-22 · updated 2026-10-24
- Weakness: CWE-193
Description
In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.13.2 up to and including 1.25.1, stub or forward zones where the name is below an intermediate labed below a DNSSEC signed zone could be shadowed by the intermediate label's secure NXDOMAIN answer from the parent. This is caused by an off-by-one error in 'harden-below-nxdomain' logic; enabled by default. It effectively bypasses the configuration and the configured stub/forward zone is never contacted. 'harden-below-nxdomain' does an upward DNS cache walk together with a delegation point guard that does not allow NXDOMAIN synthesis above stub/forward zones. The guard tests the domain name but before stripping a label. This results in an iteration where the domain name equals the configured stub/forward zone apex that passes the guard, strips one more label, and probes the cache at the apex's immediate public parent. If that parent has a cached DNSSEC-secure NXDOMAIN, which it will for any private namespace nested two or more labels under a signed public name, the walk returns it and the configured stub/forward upstream is never contacted. This can only be triggered by the query for the intermediate label (between the stub/forward apex and the DNSSEC parent zone).
Affected products
- NLnet Labs Unbound: from 1.13.2 before 1.25.2 — fixed in 1.25.2
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: NLnet Labs Unbound 1.25.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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