CVE-2026-56444 — Degradation of resolution service when 'discard-timeout' and 'serve-expired-client-timeout' are combined in unusual configuration

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.20.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when Unbound is configured with 'serve-expired: yes' and 'serve-expired-client-timeout > discard-timeout > 0' (contrary to the suggested values), the discard-timeout branch during the serve expired logic drops an aged client reply without performing the correct accounting for the number of reply addresses for the query. Other identical branches outside of serve expired perform the correct decrement. Since the counter is never decremented in such scenario, it can reach the maximum limit and new clients for duplicate in-flight queries are silently dropped resulting in degradation of resolution service. A malicious actor can exploit the vulnerability by querying the resolver for a client-controlled slow-on-demand authoritative zone that can drive the counter past the threshold. Shipped defaults for 'serve-expired-client-timeout…

Published Jul 22, 2026Updated Jul 22, 2026Sources: 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

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)

nlnet labs

Products (1)

unbound

Every base score collected

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

Score	Version	Severity	Expl.	Impact	Source
5.9	CVSS 3.1	MEDIUM	—	—	cvelistV5

Weakness & attack patterns

CWE-772

Attack patterns reported against this CVE. The ATT&CK techniques below are inferred from its weakness class.

T1499.002Endpoint Denial of Service: Service Exhaustion Flood

References

1 on the record

www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-56444.txt
vendor-advisory

Elsewhere on this site

nlnet labsevery CVE for this vendor
CWE-772other pages naming this weakness

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.