Resource exhaustion in PowerDNS - CVE-2016-7068

 

Resource exhaustion in PowerDNS - CVE-2016-7068

Published: September 11, 2018 / Updated: July 28, 2020


Vulnerability identifier: #VU32136
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-2016-7068
CWE-ID: CWE-400
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability: No public exploit available

Vulnerability details

The vulnerability allows a remote non-authenticated attacker to perform a denial of service (DoS) attack.

An issue has been found in PowerDNS before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2, and PowerDNS recursor before 3.7.4 and 4.0.4, allowing a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause an abnormal CPU usage load on the PowerDNS server by sending crafted DNS queries, which might result in a partial denial of service if the system becomes overloaded. This issue is based on the fact that the PowerDNS server parses all records present in a query regardless of whether they are needed or even legitimate. A specially crafted query containing a large number of records can be used to take advantage of that behaviour.


Affected software

PowerDNS
Arch Linux
Fedora
Cisco Secure Access Control
pdns (Alpine package)
pdns-recursor (Alpine package)
pdns
pdns-recursor

How to mitigate CVE-2016-7068

Install update from vendor's website.

PowerDNS - addressed in versions 3.4.11, 3.7.4
pdns (Alpine package) - update to 4.0.3-r0
pdns-recursor (Alpine package) - update to 4.0.4-r0
pdns - addressed in versions 3.4.11-1.el7, 4.0.3-1.fc24, 4.0.3-1.fc25
pdns-recursor - addressed in versions 3.7.4-1.el6, 3.7.4-1.el7, 4.0.4-1.fc24, 4.0.4-1.fc25

External References

Related Security Bulletins