FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

Unbound -- Denial of service attack

Affected packages
unbound < 1.21.1

Details

VuXML ID 2368755b-83f6-11ef-8d2e-a04a5edf46d9
Discovery 2024-10-03
Entry 2024-10-06

NLnet labs report:

A vulnerability has been discovered in Unbound when handling replies with very large RRsets that Unbound 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.

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.

References

CVE Name CVE-2024-8508
URL https://nlnetlabs.nl/news/2024/Oct/03/unbound-1.21.1-released/