What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-96405: Aggregate DNS name chained pointer decompression work leads to degradation of service.
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-10-21 · updated 2026-10-29
- Weakness: CWE-770
Description
NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.26.1 limits compression-pointer traversal for each individual domain-name operation but has no aggregate inbound decompression-work budget. Many chained compression pointers in a message results in a lot of CPU usage following them. A malicious actor with recursive-query access and control of an ordinarily delegated authority that serves specially crafted replies can exploit the vulnerability and degrade Unbound's general performance.
Affected products
- NLnet Labs Unbound: before 1.26.2 — fixed in 1.26.2
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: NLnet Labs Unbound 1.26.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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