CVE-2026-55990CWE-457

Packet of death for a DNSCrypt misconfigured Unbound

Medium · published July 22, 2026

CVSS v3.1
5.9
EPSS
0%
Percentile
15.1
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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').

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.9 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00247 · 15.1th percentile
Weakness
CWE-457 · Use of Uninitialized Variable
Published
2026-07-22T13:10Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 22 JUL 13:10Z
    Packet of death for a DNSCrypt misconfigured Unbound
    cvelistv5