CVE-2026-42960 (GCVE-0-2026-42960)

Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2026-05-20 09:21 – Updated: 2026-05-20 13:04
VLAI
Title
Possible cache poisoning via promiscuous records for the authority section
Summary
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.
Severity
5.7 (Medium)
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
SSVC
Exploitation: none Automatable: no Technical Impact: partial
CISA Coordinator · CISA-ADP (v2.0.3)
Decision recorded 2026-05-20 13:04 UTC
CWE
  • CWE-349 - Acceptance of Extraneous Untrusted Data With Trusted Data
Assigner
References
Impacted products
Vendor Product Version CPE status
NLnet Labs Unbound Affected: 0 , < 1.25.1 (semver)
guessed Create a notification for this product.
Date Public
2026-05-20 00:00
Credits
TaoFei Guo (Peking University) Yang Luo (Tsinghua University) JianJun Chen (Tsinghua University)
Show details on NVD website
To clipboard 

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Forecast uses a logistic model when the trend is rising, or an exponential decay model when the trend is falling. Fitted via linearized least squares.

Sightings

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Nomenclature

  • Seen: The vulnerability was mentioned, discussed, or observed by the user.
  • Confirmed: The vulnerability has been validated from an analyst's perspective.
  • Published Proof of Concept: A public proof of concept is available for this vulnerability.
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  • Not patched: The vulnerability was not observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.


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