CVE-2026-42955

low

Description

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.16.2 up to and including 1.25.1, a similar vulnerability as with CVE-2026-40622 in the 'ghost domain names' family of attacks was found in Unbound that could extend the ghost domain window by up to one cached TTL configured value for A/AAAA glue records. Similar to other 'ghost domain names' attacks, an adversary needs to control a (ghost) zone and be able to query a vulnerable Unbound. A single client A/AAAA query can cause Unbound to overwrite the cached expired parent-side glue rrset and essentially extend the ghost domain window by up to one cached TTL configured value ('cache-max-ttl'). In configurations where 'harden-referral-path: yes' is used (non-default configuration), no client query is required since Unbound implicitly performs that query. This is a variant of CVE-2026-40622 which only addressed the NS query.

References

https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-42955.txt

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2026-07-22

Updated: 2026-07-24

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 2.6

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

Severity: Low

CVSS v3

Base Score: 3.7

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

Severity: Low

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00276