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MEDIUM

CVE-2026-52863

CVE-2026-52863 — Memory corruption could lead to crash and denial of service

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.25.0 up to and including 1.25.1, a fix that makes the 'respip' and 'dns64' modules work together, creates a shallow copy of the view name in effect that could lead to memory corruption if the owner of the original view name is jostled out when Unbound is under pressure. Unbound needs to be configured with one of 'respip'/'rpz' modules, together with a module that can attach subqueries (respip CNAME redirection, dns64, subnetcache) and a configured 'access-control-view' while Unbound is under pressure so that joslte logic kicks in and starts dropping slow queries. The subquery is getting a shallow copy of the view name and if the super query which owns the view name is jostled out, memory corruption can occur. Likelihood of a crash is low, since it relies heavily on the underlying memory allocator and the memory layout. Debug memory builds (e.g., ASAN) that catch…

Published Updated Sources: cvelistV5, NLnet Labs

Triage

Is it exploited, how likely is exploitation, what does it touch, and how severe do the scoring sources call it.

Exploitation

Unreported

no source claims exploitation

EPSS

0%

chance of exploitation in 30 days

Affects

nlnet labs

unbound

CVSS base

5.9

MEDIUM

CISA SSVC assessment

Three decision points CISA publishes for the CVEs it assesses · SSVC 2.0.3. A stakeholder decision, not a severity score.

CISA

Exploitation

None

none · proof-of-concept · active

Automatable

Yes

can an attacker script all four kill-chain steps

Technical impact

Partial

partial · total control of the vulnerable component

Affected scope

The catalog records vendors and products as separate lists, not pairs, so which product belongs to which vendor is not something this page can say.

Vendors (1)

Products (1)

unbound

Every base score collected

Sources score independently and disagree; each row says who scored it and under which version.

ScoreVersionSeverityExpl.ImpactSource
5.9CVSS 3.1MEDIUMcvelistV5

Weakness & attack patterns

  • CWE-416

Detection

Read off the CVSS vector and the weakness class. Starting points, not rules we have tested.

  • Search application, proxy, and WAF logs for requests touching /'rpz'.

References

1 on the record

Elsewhere on this site

Not in any source we poll

Listed rather than left blank: an empty field and an unmeasured one look identical on screen, and only one is a reason to look elsewhere.

  • No confirmed IOCs, IP addresses, domains, file hashes, or malware artifacts supplied.
  • No organization-specific asset inventory, compensating-control status, or patch deployment evidence supplied.
  • No exploit packet captures, log samples, or incident case IDs supplied.