CVE-2026-55990 (GCVE-0-2026-55990)

Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2026-07-22 13:10 – Updated: 2026-07-22 14:04
VLAI
Title
Packet of death for a DNSCrypt misconfigured Unbound
Summary
In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.7.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when the 'dnscrypt:' clause lists more 'dnscrypt-provider-cert:' files than there are matching 'dnscrypt-secret-key:' files, Unbound fills only the matched prefix and leaves the tail slots at the '0xdb' fill that libsodium's allocator writes into every allocation. Unbound would then iterate over the number of cert files, not the actual slots, so it walks into a slot with garbage data filled with '0xdb' bytes. Any unauthenticated client that sends one UDP datagram of ≥ 68 bytes whose first 8 bytes are '0xdb' to 'dnscrypt-port' will use that garbage entry which leads to a garbage dereference killing the server. This is a silent faulty configuration that goes unnoticed until triggered with the right client query. Unbound needs to be compiled with DNSCrypt support ('--enable-dnscrypt').
Severity
5.9 (Medium)
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
SSVC
Exploitation: none Automatable: no Technical Impact: partial
CISA Coordinator (v2.0.3)
CWE
  • CWE-457 - Use of Uninitialized Variable
Assigner
References
Impacted products
Vendor Product Version
NLnet Labs Unbound Affected: 1.7.0 , < 1.25.2 (semver)
Create a notification for this product.
Date Public
2026-07-22 00:00
Credits
Qifan Zhang (Palo Alto Networks)
Show details on NVD website
To clipboard 

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