CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-25829 — An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor before 4.1.18, 4.2.x before 4.2.5, and 4.3.x before 4.3.5

High CVSS 7.5

An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor before 4.1.18, 4.2.x before 4.2.5, and 4.3.x before 4.3.5. A remote attacker can cause the cached records for a given name to be updated to the Bogus DNSSEC validation state, instead of their actual DNSSEC Secure state, via a DNS ANY query. This results in a denial of service for installation that always validate (dnssec=validate), and for clients requesting validation when on-demand validation is enabled (dnssec=process).

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application

Affected products

  • powerdns / recursor
  • opensuse / backports_sle / 15.0
  • opensuse / leap / 15.1
  • opensuse / leap / 15.2

Showing 4 representative product identities from 7 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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

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