CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-1931 — Nlnetlabs Unbound security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

NLnet Labs Unbound version 1.18.0 up to and including version 1.19.1 contain a vulnerability that can cause denial of service by a certain code path that can lead to an infinite loop. Unbound 1.18.0 introduced a feature that removes EDE records from responses with size higher than the client's advertised buffer size. Before removing all the EDE records however, it would try to see if trimming the extra text fields on those records would result in an acceptable size while still retaining the EDE codes. Due to an unchecked condition, the code that trims the text of the EDE records could loop indefinitely. This happens when Unbound would reply with attached EDE information on a positive reply and the client's buffer size is smaller than the needed space to include EDE records. The vulnerability can only be triggered when the 'ede: yes' option is used; non default configuration. From version 1.19.2 on, the code is fixed to avoid looping indefinitely.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-03-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • nlnetlabs / unbound
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 38
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 39
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 40

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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