CVE-2026-5856

high

Description

Contiki-NG's DNS/mDNS resolver skip_name() in os/services/resolv/resolv.c walks DNS wire-format name labels with no packet-boundary check, and the caller in newdata() invokes it in a loop iterating nquestions times from the attacker-controlled DNS header before validating the transaction ID. An attacker who sets nquestions higher than the number of complete questions present causes skip_name() to walk past the UDP packet buffer, and the returned pointer is cast to struct dns_answer * for further memory reads. On builds with RESOLV_CONF_SUPPORTS_MDNS enabled, any peer on the local segment can trigger the read unauthenticated via a multicast UDP 5353 packet with no outstanding query required; on standard DNS builds an attacker who can inject a UDP response from port 53 during an outstanding query can trigger the same read. Impact is out-of-bounds read of uip_buf and adjacent memory, disclosing memory contents or crashing the resolver.

References

https://github.com/contiki-ng/contiki-ng/pull/3169

https://github.com/contiki-ng/contiki-ng/commit/04a3f0a0067d2ee87d1f297b6d0f4392d8c98ffe

https://github.com/contiki-ng/contiki-ng

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2026-08-06

Updated: 2026-08-07

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 6.8

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

Severity: Medium

CVSS v3

Base Score: 7.1

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

Severity: High

CVSS v4

Base Score: 7.1

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

Severity: High

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00253