Bug 2506150 (CVE-2026-50251)

Summary: CVE-2026-50251 unbound: NLnet Labs Unbound: Denial of Service via crafted DNS glue records
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot>
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Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: rhel-process-autobot, watson-tool-maintainers
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in Unbound. A remote malicious actor can exploit a vulnerability by controlling a DNS delegation that returns specific glue records. This can cause Unbound to repeatedly clear its DNS caches, leading to a continuous Denial of Service (DoS) for DNS resolution.
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Bug Depends On: 2507955    
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-07-22 14:02:54 UTC 
In NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.1, when 'unwanted-reply-threshold' is enabled (set to any value greater than zero), glue records of 0.0.0.0/::0 can short-circuit Unbound, on systems that can direct such traffic, by issuing DNS queries and receiving seemingly unwanted replies since the remote IP does not match the original source IP of 0.0.0.0/::0. This behavior keeps on looping for the glue records and pushing the counter to the configured 'unwanted-reply-threshold' that triggers a defensive cache clear. A malicious actor who controls a delegation that returns in-bailiwick glue of 0.0.0.0/::0 can drive the counter to the limit of 'unwanted-reply-threshold' to the threshold and trigger a cache clean of the message and rrset caches; at will, indefinitely, without sending a single spoofed packet. The iterator uses the 0.0.0.0/::0 glue, and a system that can route this (e.g., Linux kernel routes the datagram over loopback), Unbound's own listener answers from 127.0.0.1. Because of the mismatch of 0.0.0.0 and 127.0.0.1, in this example, Unbound accounts the reply as an unwanted (probably spoofed) answer. The counter resets to zero on every cache flush, so the attack loops forever.