CVE-2023-26437: Deterred spoofing attempts can lead to authoritative servers being marked unavailable

Affected versions

NVD version ranges (for catalog products). Add the product to your stack with a version and matching uses these.

• powerdns recursorbefore 4.6.6
• powerdns recursor4.7.0 and later · before 4.7.5
• powerdns recursor4.8.0 and later · before 4.8.4

Versions reported by the vendor

Affected version ranges reported by the assigning authority (OX). Independent of NVD's CPE analysis and usually ahead of it.

• PowerDNS Recursor

  • up to and including 4.6.5affected · range
  • up to and including 4.7.4affected · range
  • up to and including 4.8.3affected · range

Package-level exposure

OSV and GitHub Advisory data: ecosystem, package and range. SBOM matching uses this table.

Other highest-scoring records for the same primary product.

• CVE-2018-16855An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor before version 4.1.8 where a remote attacker sending a DNS query can trigger an out-of-bounds m
  48Plan
• CVE-2017-15120An issue has been found in the parsing of authoritative answers in PowerDNS Recursor before 4.0.8, leading to a NULL pointer dereference whe
  45Plan
• CVE-2009-4009Buffer overflow in PowerDNS Recursor before 3.1.7.2 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) or possibly execute
  45Plan

Published before and after this one in the same product

• ← EarlierCVE-2022-37428Aug 23, 2022 · PowerDNS Recursor up to and including 4.5.9, 4.6.2 and 4.7.1, when protobuf logging is enabled, has Improper Cleanup upon a Thrown Exception
  26Monitor
• ← EarlierCVE-2023-22617Jan 21, 2023 · A remote attacker might be able to cause infinite recursion in PowerDNS Recursor 4.8.0 via a DNS query that retrieves DS records for a misco
  32Monitor
• Later →CVE-2024-25583Apr 25, 2024 · Crafted responses can lead to a denial of service in Recursor if recursive forwarding is configured
  30Monitor

FIRST EPSS daily score; only changes of 0.01 or more are recorded (step chart).

Root cause

Code that parses nested structures sets no depth or size limit. A small input can turn into a disproportionate processing load.

A representative example of this vulnerability class. Not the vendor's source code; it shows the faulty pattern and its fix.

1function expand(node) {2  return node.children.map(expand);3}

1const MAX_DEPTH = 32;2function expand(node, depth = 0) {3  if (depth > MAX_DEPTH) throw new Error("too deep");4  return node.children.map((c) => expand(c, depth + 1));5}

Attack context

MITRE CAPEC attack patterns and ATT&CK techniques for this weakness class (CWE). A starting point for detection rules and threat hunting.