CVE-2026-123602

high

Description

The Hickory DNS recursor in all versions of hickory-recursor and in hickory-resolver 0.26.0-beta.1 before 0.26.2 (recursor feature) is vulnerable to ghost domain names attacks because it reuses child-side apex NS RRsets cached from zone NS queries for iterative resolution. By repeatedly querying a zone's NS records, an attacker keeps the stale RRset cached indefinitely, letting name servers whose delegation the parent revoked keep answering for the zone.

References

https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/hickory-dns-recursor-ghost-domain-attack-via-child-side-ns-rrset-caching

https://github.com/hickory-dns/hickory-dns/security/advisories/GHSA-2hxp-x833-73f7

https://euvd.enisa.europa.eu/vulnerability/EUVD-2026-119361

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2026-11-08

Updated: 2026-11-09

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 5.4

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:H/Au:N/C:N/I:C/A:N

Severity: Medium

CVSS v3

Base Score: 5.9

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Severity: Medium

CVSS v4

Base Score: 8.2

Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Severity: High

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00271