Unbound 1.7.01.25.1 RRSIG.Labels Poisoning via NSEC Aggressive Cache
CVE-2026-44690 Published on July 22, 2026
Cross-zone wildcard cache poisoning via RRSIG.labels manipulation
In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.7.0 up to and including 1.25.1, insufficient validation of the RRSIG.Labels field combined with premature cache writes during RFC 8198 aggressive NSEC processing leads to cache poisoning that permits a malicious actor controlling a single delegated zone to poison arbitrary sibling zones under NSEC-signed parent domains. A malicious actor with one registered domain under an NSEC-signed TLD can serve malicious insecure DNS responses for unrelated sibling domains (sharing the same parent zone). Arbitrary delegations that do not exist under the parent domain and are covered by the parent's NSEC chain can be brought into insecure existence by fraudulent wildcard DS records (less labels than expected, unknown algorithm) from the malicious sibling domain. This allows the malicious actor to inject insecure wildcard records for those delegations.
Timeline
Issue reported by Qifan Zhang
NLnet Labs shares patch 1 day later.
Qifan Zhang verifies patch
Multi-vendor coordinated fixes released with version 1.25.2 99 days later.
Weakness Type
Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity
The software does not sufficiently verify the origin or authenticity of data, in a way that causes it to accept invalid data.
Products Associated with CVE-2026-44690
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Affected Versions
NLnet Labs Unbound:- Version 1.7.0 and below 1.25.2 is affected.
Exploit Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.