NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.21.0 contains a vulnerability when handling replies with very large RRsets that it needs to perform name compression for. Malicious upstreams responses with very large RRsets can cause Unbound to spend a considerable time applying name compression to downstream replies. This can lead to degraded performance and eventually denial of service in well orchestrated attacks. The vulnerability can be exploited by a malicious actor querying Unbound for the specially crafted contents of a malicious zone with very large RRsets. Before Unbound replies to the query it will try to apply name compression which was an unbounded operation that could lock the CPU until the whole packet was complete. Unbound version 1.21.1 introduces a hard limit on the number of name compression calculations it is willing to do per packet. Packets that need more compression will result in semi-compressed packets or truncated packets, even on TCP for huge messages, to avoid locking the CPU for long. This change should not affect normal DNS traffic.
Upstream information about the CVE: https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2024-8508.txt
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Via RHSA-2024:11232 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:11232
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 Extended Update Support Via RHSA-2024:11170 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:11170
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.16 Via RHSA-2025:0140 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:0140
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Via RHSA-2025:0837 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:0837
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.17 Via RHSA-2025:1120 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:1120
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Via RHSA-2025:8047 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:8047
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Via RHSA-2025:8197 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:8197