CVE-2026-40691
In Unbound 1.9.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when a DNSCrypt query is received over TCP, the routine that encrypts the reply in place fails to bound the reply length against the destination buffer size. The size clamp that protects the UDP path is not applied on the TCP path, so a reply larger than 65504 bytes is shifted forward by 48 bytes inside a buffer of capacity equal to 'msg-buffer-size', writing past the end of the heap allocation. A single malicious encrypted query crashes the resolver and lead to denial of service. This vulnerability needs Unbound to be compiled with DNSCrypt support ('--enable-dnscrypt') and the 'dnscrypt:' clause to be configured and enabled for the listening interfaces.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can take the service offline.
- Weakness
- A heap overflow corrupts allocator structures and can lead to code execution.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doFold into the next patch cycle. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.