CVE-2026-42960: medium-severity vulnerability in NLnet Labs Unbound
Possible cache poisoning via promiscuous records for the authority section
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 5.7epss 0.3%
NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 is vulnerable to poisoning via promiscuous records for the authority section. Promiscuous RRSets that complement DNS replies in the authority section can be used to trick Unbound to cache such records. If an adversary is able to attach such records in a reply (i.e., spoofed packet, fragmentation attack) he would be able to poison Unbound's cache. A malicious actor can exploit the possible poisonous effect by injecting RRSets other than NS that are also accompanied by address records in a reply, for example MX. This could be achieved by trying to spoof a reply packet or fragmentation attacks. Unbound would then accept the relative address records in the additional section and cache them if the authority RRSet has enough trust at this point, i.e., in-zone data for the delegation point. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix that disregards address records from the additional section if they are not explicitly relevant only to authority NS records, mitigating the possible poison effect. This is a complement fix to CVE-2025-11411.
CVSS:4.0/AV:A/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:H/SA:H/E:P/U:Amber
Affected products
NLnet Labs · UnboundRelated CVEs — NLnet Labs Unbound
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2024-1931HIGHDenial of service when trimming EDE text on positive repliesEPSS 2.5%CVE-2022-3204HIGHNRDelegation AttackEPSS 1.6%CVE-2026-33278CRITICALPossible arbitrary code execution during DNSSEC validationEPSS 1.4%CVE-2022-30699—Novel "ghost domain names" attack by updating almost expired delegation informationEPSS 1.2%CVE-2022-30698—Novel "ghost domain names" attack by introducing subdomain delegationsEPSS 1.2%CVE-2026-81642CRITICALHeap buffer overflow and possible Remote Code Execution when digesting DNSKEYEPSS 1.0%