CVE-2026-81642
Received
Received - Intake
Denial of Service in Unbound DNSSEC Validator
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-81642, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-09-16
Last updated on: 2026-09-16
Assigner: NLnet Labs
Description
Description
In NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including 1.26.0, a vulnerability was found in the DNSSEC validator that enables denial of service and possible remote code execution as a result of digesting DNSKEYs. A DNSKEY with an owner compression pointer to its own RDATA can overflow the digest buffer. Remote code execution is possible through attacker controlled data. An adversary can exploit the vulnerability by controlling a malicious zone and querying a vulnerable Unbound.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| nlnet_labs | unbound | to 1.26.0 (inc) |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-122 | A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc(). |
