Vulnerability details

CVE-2026-32665

NLnet Labs Unbound

Remote DNS-over-QUIC denial of service due to `quic-size` budget bypass

CVSS 3.1
7.5High

Official description

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.22.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when downstream DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) is enabled, the first two bidirectional streams on a new QUIC connection (stream_id 0 and 4) bypass the per-stream 'quic-size' gate entirely, and large input buffers are allocated later, after only the 2-byte length prefix has been received from the initial streams. As a result, a remote client can make Unbound exceed the configured 'quic-size' limit with low-cost input. Using only one connection and two streams, each sending a declared 65535-byte length prefix and then holding the streams open, a client can already trivially make Unbound roughly allocate double that amount. This is a remote availability issue / memory-accounting bypass in the downstream DoQ implementation that leads to denial of service for new DoQ clients. This vulnerability needs Unbound to be compiled with DoQ support ('--with-libngtcp2') and the 'quic-port' to be configured for the listening interfaces.

CVSS scores

ScoreVersionSourceVector
7.5High 3.1 CVEProject cvelistV5 (CNA) (NLnet Labs) CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

VendorProductVersionsSource
NLnet Labs Unbound 1.22.0 ≤ v < 1.25.2 CVEProject cvelistV5 (CNA)

References and advisories

1
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Details

Published
2026-07-22
Last updated
2026-09-16
State
Published
Assigner (CNA)
NLnet Labs

Exploit prediction (EPSS)

0.28%
Probability of exploitation in 30 days
21%
Percentile (among all CVEs)

SSVC assessment (CISA)

Automatable
Yes
Exploitation
None
Technical impact
Partial

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-1284
    Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input