Low severity · published Oct 21, 2026
CVE-2026-35501
Bypass of a configured island trust anchor underneath an insecure parent from an atacker-controlled NSEC record.
3.7
CVSS
0.1%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
When NLnet Labs Unbound 1.0.1 up to and including version 1.26.1 is configured with both a root trust anchor and an additional 'trust-anchor:' for an island-of-security zone whose parent is provably insecure under the root chain, a malicious actor with a forged NSEC reply with the SOA bit cleared can trick Unbound to treat the configured trust island as insecure. This happens because the DNSSEC validator in Unbound accepts and caches the NSEC insecure response bypassing the RRSIG validation that the validator was supposed to do. The acceptance of the NSEC record at the trust anchor apex was allowed due to and old fix for type DS and NSEC queries from clients when trust anchor for that name existed.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
High
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
Low
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.1% · higher than 1% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
UN
Unbound · NLnet Labs
1.0.1 before 1.26.2 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-35501
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35501
www.nlnetlabs.nl
https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-35501.txt
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