CVE-2026-96405: medium-severity vulnerability in NLnet Labs Unbound
Aggregate DNS name chained pointer decompression work leads to degradation of service.
Published · Updated
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13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 5.3epss 0.3%
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.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
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%