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© 2026 FAUCET Technologies LLC. All rights reserved.

CVE-2026-42959

34
FAUCET Score

NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 has a denial of service vulnerability in the DNSSEC validator that can lead to a crash given malicious upstream replies. When Unbound constructs chase-reply messages for validation, the code uses the wrong counter to calculate write offsets for ADDITIONAL section rrsets. DNAME duplication could increase the ANSWER section count and authority filtering could decrease the AUTHORITY section count and create an uninitialized array slot. Combining these two, the validator later dereferences this uninitialized pointer, causing an immediate process crash. An adversary controlling a DNSSEC-signed domain can trigger this bug with a single query by configuring a DNAME chain with unsigned CNAMEs and a response containing unsigned AUTHORITY records alongside signed ADDITIONAL glue records. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to use the proper counters to calculate the write offsets.

First published: May 20, 2026Last modified: May 20, 2026

Impacted Technologies

VendorProductVersion(s)CPE
< 1.25.1CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:a:nlnetlabs:unbound:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
>= 0, < 1.25.1CPE match
cpe:2.3:a:nlnetlabs:unbound:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

CVSS Data

CVSS version used by this source: 4.0

8.7HIGH

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:Red

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
LOW
Attack Requirements
NONE
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
VS Confidentiality
NONE
VS Integrity
NONE
VS Availability
HIGH
SS Confidentiality
NONE
SS Integrity
NONE
SS Availability
NONE
Exploit Maturity
NOT_DEFINED
CvssVersion
4.0

Exploit Intelligence

EPSS Score
0.78%
Probability of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS Percentile
52.1%
Percentile rank of EPSS score among Peer Group
As of 2026-07-26
Model: v2026.06.15
This CVE's current EPSS score of 0.0078 is in the 28th percentile among its peer group of 51,485 CVEs.

Social Chatter

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.0 Reddit, 0.1 Bluesky, 0.1 Mastodon, and 0.4 GitHub mentions.

Media Mentions

No media coverage found for this CVE.

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.1 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.

Remediation

Patch Available

Vendor Patches (10)

microsoftpatch availablevia msrc
Product: 20736-17084Fixed in: 1.25.1-1
microsoftpatch availablevia msrc
Product: azl3 unbound 1.19.1-5 on Azure Linux 3.0Fixed in: 1.25.1-1
ubuntupatch availablevia ubuntu_usn
Product: unbound (questing)Fixed in: 1.22.0-2ubuntu2.3
ubuntupatch availablevia ubuntu_usn
Product: unbound (resolute)Fixed in: 1.24.2-1ubuntu2.1
ubuntupatch availablevia ubuntu_usn
Product: unbound (bionic)Fixed in: 1.6.7-1ubuntu2.6+esm4
ubuntupatch availablevia ubuntu_usn
Product: unbound (jammy)Fixed in: 1.13.1-1ubuntu5.15
ubuntupatch availablevia ubuntu_usn
Product: unbound (trusty)Fixed in: 1.4.22-1ubuntu4.14.04.3+esm3
ubuntupatch availablevia ubuntu_usn
Product: unbound (xenial)Fixed in: 1.5.8-1ubuntu1.1+esm3
ubuntupatch availablevia ubuntu_usn
Product: unbound (focal)Fixed in: 1.9.4-2ubuntu1.11+esm1
ubuntupatch availablevia ubuntu_usn
Product: unbound (noble)Fixed in: 1.19.2-1ubuntu3.8

Vendor Advisories (3)

ubuntuUSN-8282-2

Unbound vulnerabilities

Jun 2, 2026
ubuntuUSN-8282-1

Unbound vulnerabilities

May 20, 2026
microsoft2026-May/CVE-2026-42959Moderate

Crash during DNSSEC validation of malicious content

May 12, 2026

References

access.redhat.com / errata/RHSA-2026:19752
access.redhat.com / errata/RHSA-2026:23231
access.redhat.com / errata/RHSA-2026:24365
access.redhat.com / errata/RHSA-2026:24369
access.redhat.com / security/cve/CVE-2026-42959
bugzilla.redhat.com / show_bug.cgi
security.access.redhat.com / data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-42959.json
nlnetlabs.nl / downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-42959.txt
MitigationVendor Advisory