CVE-2026-44690

Cross-zone wildcard cache poisoning via RRSIG.labels manipulation

HIGH
7.5
CVSS Score
Published: July 22, 2026 at 01:06 PM UTC
Updated: October 24, 2026 at 01:10 PM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorUnbound

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Severity
HIGH7.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.2%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.7.0 up to and including 1.25.1, insufficient validation of the RRSIG.Labels field combined with premature cache writes during RFC 8198 aggressive NSEC processing leads to cache poisoning that permits a malicious actor controlling a single delegated zone to poison arbitrary sibling zones under NSEC-signed parent domains. A malicious actor with one registered domain under an NSEC-signed TLD can serve malicious insecure DNS responses for unrelated sibling domains (sharing the same parent zone). Arbitrary delegations that do not exist under the parent domain and are covered by the parent's NSEC chain can be brought into insecure existence by fraudulent wildcard DS records (less labels than expected, unknown algorithm) from the malicious sibling domain. This allows the malicious actor to inject insecure wildcard records for those delegations.

Affected

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

1.7.0 ≤ v < 1.25.21.7.0
Affected range stops below 1.25.2, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

Remediation

No guide yet

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

References (1)

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitAutomatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

7.5HIGHNLnet Labs
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusANALYZED
CWE
CWE-345

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