High severity · published Jul 22, 2026
CVE-2026-32665
Remote DNS-over-QUIC denial of service due to `quic-size` budget bypass
7.5
CVSS
0.3%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.22.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when downstream DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) is enabled, the first two bidirectional streams on a new QUIC connection (stream_id 0 and 4) bypass the per-stream 'quic-size' gate entirely, and large input buffers are allocated later, after only the 2-byte length prefix has been received from the initial streams. As a result, a remote client can make Unbound exceed the configured 'quic-size' limit with low-cost input. Using only one connection and two streams, each sending a declared 65535-byte length prefix and then holding the streams open, a client can already trivially make Unbound roughly allocate double that amount. This is a remote availability issue / memory-accounting bypass in the downstream DoQ implementation that leads to denial of service for new DoQ clients. This vulnerability needs Unbound to be compiled with DoQ support ('--with-libngtcp2') and the 'quic-port' to be configured for the listening interfaces.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.3% · higher than 21% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
UN
Unbound · NLnet Labs
1.22.0 before 1.25.2 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-32665
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-32665
Vendor Advisory
https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-32665.txt
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