CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-8616 — Isc Bind security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A malicious actor who intentionally exploits this lack of effective limitation on the number of fetches performed when processing referrals can, through the use of specially crafted referrals, cause a recursing server to issue a very large number of fetches in an attempt to process the referral. This has at least two potential effects: The performance of the recursing server can potentially be degraded by the additional work required to perform these fetches, and The attacker can exploit this behavior to use the recursing server as a reflector in a reflection attack with a high amplification factor.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-05-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • isc / bind
  • isc / bind / 9.12.4
  • isc / bind / 9.9.3
  • isc / bind / 9.10.5
  • isc / bind / 9.10.7

Showing 5 representative product identities from 20 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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