CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-19331 — knot-resolver before version 4.3.0 is vulnerable to denial of service through high CPU utilization

High CVSS 7.5

knot-resolver before version 4.3.0 is vulnerable to denial of service through high CPU utilization. DNS replies with very many resource records might be processed very inefficiently, in extreme cases taking even several CPU seconds for each such uncached message. For example, a few thousand A records can be squashed into one DNS message (limit is 64kB).

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2019-12-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-407, CWE-404

Affected products

  • nic / knot_resolver
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.