CVE-2026-35501

Bypass of a configured island trust anchor underneath an insecure parent from an atacker-controlled NSEC record.

LOW
3.7
CVSS Score
Published: October 21, 2026 at 08:56 AM UTC
Updated: October 22, 2026 at 03:22 PM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorUnbound

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Severity
LOW3.7
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.1%

Description

When NLnet Labs Unbound 1.0.1 up to and including version 1.26.1 is configured with both a root trust anchor and an additional 'trust-anchor:' for an island-of-security zone whose parent is provably insecure under the root chain, a malicious actor with a forged NSEC reply with the SOA bit cleared can trick Unbound to treat the configured trust island as insecure. This happens because the DNSSEC validator in Unbound accepts and caches the NSEC insecure response bypassing the RRSIG validation that the validator was supposed to do. The acceptance of the NSEC record at the trust anchor apex was allowed due to and old fix for type DS and NSEC queries from clients when trust anchor for that name existed.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

References (1)

CVSS

3.7LOWNLnet Labs
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusAWAITING ANALYSIS
CWE
CWE-354

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