CVE-2026-44690 HIGH

CVE-2026-44690: Cross-zone wildcard cache poisoning via RRSIG.labels manipulation

Vendor Nlnet Labs
Product Unbound
Weakness CWE-345
Published July 22, 2026
Last update July 22, 2026

CVSS base score

7.5/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Confidentiality None
Integrity High

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

What the vulnerability does

01Description

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.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

July 22, 2026 CVE published
July 22, 2026 Record updated

Related vulnerabilities

04Related CVE