GHSA-h8mm-c463-wjq3 — CoreDNS' transfer stanza selection uses lexicographic compare (subzone ACL bypass)

Affected: Go: github.com/coredns/coredns

### Summary CoreDNS' transfer plugin can select the wrong ACL stanza when both a parent zone and a more-specific subzone are configured. A permissive parent-zone transfer rule can override a restrictive subzone rule (name-dependent), allowing an unauthorized client to perform AXFR/IXFR for the subzone and retrieve its zone contents.

### Details In plugin/transfer/transfer.go, stanza selection is implemented by longestMatch(), which is documented as "longest zone match wins", but it actually chooses the winner via a lexicographic string comparison: - zone := "" // longest zone match wins (plugin/transfer/transfer.go) - if z > zone { zone = z; x = xfr } (plugin/transfer/transfer.go)

So, a parent zone like example.org. can beat a child zone like a.example.org. purely due to lexicographic ordering ("example.org." > "a.example.org."), even though the child zone is the longer/more specific suffix match. The bypass is data-dependent (some child labels will win, some will lose), making it operationally non-intuitive.

### PoC 1. Adjust COREDNS_BIN in the PoC to point at right path (see the top-level const definitions for tunables as well) 2. Run python3 ./acl-repro.py 3. Expected output: *** Baseline (only subzone transfer rule) *** axfr a.example.org.: rcode=5 ancount=0 (expected REFUSED=5)

*** Candidate (add permissive parent transfer rule) *** axfr a.example.org.: rcode=0 ancount=5 (expected NOERROR=0 with ancount>0)

*** OK *** Subzone transfer ACL bypass reproduced: adding a…

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GHSA-h8mm-c463-wjq3 — CoreDNS' transfer stanza selection uses lexicographic compare (subzone ACL bypass)