CVE-2026-44390
What is CVE-2026-44390?
NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 has a vulnerability when handling replies with very large RRsets that Unbound needs to perform name compression for. Malicious upstream responses with very large RRsets with records that don't share a suffix above the root 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. An adversary can exploit the vulnerability by 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. A compression limit was introduced in 1.21.1 for this but it didn't account for the case where records would not share any suffix above the root. That causes Unbound to go in a different code path because of the compression tree lookup failure and eventually not increment the compression counter for those operations. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix that increments the compression counter regardless of the compression tree lookup. This is a complement fix to CVE-2024-8508.
FAQ
CVE-2026-44390 has a CVSS score of N/A/10, rated as Unknown. Review the affected products list and apply vendor patches.
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) rates vulnerability severity from 0.0 to 10.0. CVE-2026-44390 scores N/A/10 (Unknown). Scores 9.0–10.0 are Critical, 7.0–8.9 are High, 4.0–6.9 are Medium, and below 4.0 are Low.
The list of devices confirmed to be affected by CVE-2026-44390 is shown in the "Affected Devices" section above. Check your firmware version against the vendor security advisory and apply the latest patch.
Apply the latest firmware or software update from the vendor. Check the References section above for official advisories and patch notes. If no patch is available, consider disabling the affected feature or isolating the device from untrusted networks.