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CVE-2026-81642

nlnetlabs unbound

score 45Public PoC ×1CRITICAL 9.1

Summary

In NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including 1.26.0, a vulnerability was found in the DNSSEC validator that enables denial of service and possible remote code execution as a result of digesting DNSKEYs. A DNSKEY with an owner compression pointer to its own RDATA can overflow the digest buffer. Remote code execution is possible through attacker controlled data. An adversary can exploit the vulnerability by controlling a malicious zone and querying a vulnerable Unbound.

Published 2026-09-16 · first seen here 2026-10-10

Analysis & write-ups

No technical write-up from a research team yet. Contact Zero checks Unit 42, Google/Mandiant, Microsoft, Talos, CrowdStrike, Rapid7, watchTowr and others several times a day, plus NVD and CISA reference links.

Exploit availability

Public exploit code lowers the bar for attackers, so prioritise patching and hunting. These repositories are unverified. Fake PoCs that contain malware are common, so never run them outside an isolated lab.

Hunt & detect

Threat hunt brief, Sigma rule and Splunk / Sentinel / CrowdStrike queries are not available for this item yet.

References