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CVE-2018-5738

Some versions of BIND can improperly permit recursive query service to unauthorized clients

CVSS 5.3 MEDIUMEPSS 11.1%
In short

BIND DNS servers can accidentally allow any client on the internet to perform recursive queries when they should only allow specific trusted clients. This happens due to a configuration bug introduced in late 2017, potentially exposing the server to abuse and attacks.

Technical detail

A regression in BIND's configuration parsing causes the 'allow-recursion' setting to incorrectly inherit permissive defaults from 'allow-query' when no explicit match lists are configured, allowing unauthorized recursive queries from all hosts. The vulnerability affects BIND versions 9.9.12, 9.10.7, 9.11.x, 9.12.0-P2, and 9.13.0 when recursion is enabled and allow-query-cache/allow-query lack explicit values, resulting in DNS amplification and cache poisoning attack vectors.

Summary generated and translated by AI from the official description.
Change #4777 (introduced in October 2017) introduced an unforeseen issue in releases which were issued after that date, affecting which clients are permitted to make recursive queries to a BIND nameserver. The intended (and documented) behavior is that if an operator has not specified a value for the "allow-recursion" setting, it SHOULD default to one of the following: none, if "recursion no;" is set in named.conf; a value inherited from the "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" settings IF "recursion yes;" (the default for that setting) AND match lists are explicitly set for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" (see the BIND9 Administrative Reference Manual section 6.2 for more details); or the intended default of "allow-recursion {localhost; localnets;};" if "recursion yes;" is in effect and no values are explicitly set for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query". However, because of the regression introduced by change #4777, it is possible when "recursion yes;" is in effect and no match list values are provided for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" for the setting of "allow-recursion" to inherit a setting of all hosts from the "allow-query" setting default, improperly permitting recursion to all clients. Affects BIND 9.9.12, 9.10.7, 9.11.3, 9.12.0->9.12.1-P2, the development release 9.13.0, and also releases 9.9.12-S1, 9.10.7-S1, 9.11.3-S1, and 9.11.3-S2 from BIND 9 Supported Preview Edition.
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
Affected products
ISC · BIND 9

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