Description
NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 is vulnerable to a degradation of service attack related to parsing long lists of incoming EDNS options. An adversary sending queries with too many EDNS options can hold Unbound threads hostage while they are parsing and creating internal data structures for the options. Coordinated attacks can result in degradation and/or denial of service. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to limit acceptable incoming EDNS options (100).
Problem types
CWE-407: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity
CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Product status
Any version before 1.25.1
Timeline
| 2026-01-11: | Issue reported by N0zoM1z0 |
| 2026-01-12: | NLnet Labs shares patch |
| 2026-01-13: | N0zoM1z0 verifies patch |
| 2026-04-26: | Issue also reported by Qifan Zhang |
| 2026-04-28: | NLnet Labs shares same patch |
| 2026-04-29: | Qifan Zhang verifies patch |
| 2026-05-20: | Fixes released with version 1.25.1 |
Credits
GitHub user N0zoM1z0
Qifan Zhang (Palo Alto Networks)
References
www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-41292.txt