Resource exhaustion in PowerDNS Authoritative - CVE-2026-42001
Published: May 20, 2026
Vulnerability identifier: #VU131981
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4: 8.7 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: CVE-2026-42001
CWE-ID: CWE-400
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service.
The vulnerability exists due to missing sanity checks in the initial SOA query response handling when processing an ill-formed answer to an SOA query in autosecondary mode. A remote attacker can send or cause an ill-formed SOA query answer to cause a denial of service.
Exploitation requires the server to be running in autosecondary mode and to receive a notification for a not-yet-known domain.
Affected software
PowerDNS Authoritative
Debian Linux
Fedora
pdns (Debian package)
pdns
Debian Linux
Fedora
pdns (Debian package)
pdns
How to mitigate CVE-2026-42001
Install security update from vendor's website.
PowerDNS Authoritative - addressed in versions 4.9.15, 5.0.5
pdns (Debian package) - update to 4.9.15-0+deb13u1
pdns - addressed in versions 5.0.5-1.el9, 5.0.5-1.el10_2, 5.0.5-1.el10_3, 5.0.5-1.fc43, 5.0.5-1.fc44
pdns (Debian package) - update to 4.9.15-0+deb13u1
pdns - addressed in versions 5.0.5-1.el9, 5.0.5-1.el10_2, 5.0.5-1.el10_3, 5.0.5-1.fc43, 5.0.5-1.fc44