High severity · published Jul 22, 2026
CVE-2026-44690
Cross-zone wildcard cache poisoning via RRSIG.labels manipulation
7.5
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.7.0 up to and including 1.25.1, insufficient validation of the RRSIG.Labels field combined with premature cache writes during RFC 8198 aggressive NSEC processing leads to cache poisoning that permits a malicious actor controlling a single delegated zone to poison arbitrary sibling zones under NSEC-signed parent domains. A malicious actor with one registered domain under an NSEC-signed TLD can serve malicious insecure DNS responses for unrelated sibling domains (sharing the same parent zone). Arbitrary delegations that do not exist under the parent domain and are covered by the parent's NSEC chain can be brought into insecure existence by fraudulent wildcard DS records (less labels than expected, unknown algorithm) from the malicious sibling domain. This allows the malicious actor to inject insecure wildcard records for those delegations.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.2% · higher than 4% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
UN
Unbound · NLnet Labs
1.7.0 before 1.25.2 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-44690
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-44690
Vendor Advisory
https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2026-44690.txt
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