Resource exhaustion in PowerDNS - CVE-2016-7072
Published: September 10, 2018 / Updated: July 28, 2020
Vulnerability identifier: #VU32139
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4.0: 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/E:U/U:Green
CVE-ID: CVE-2016-7072
CWE-ID: CWE-400
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vendor: PowerDNS.COM B.V.
Affected software:
PowerDNS
PowerDNS
Detailed vulnerability description
The vulnerability allows a remote non-authenticated attacker to perform a denial of service (DoS) attack.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2 allowing a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service by opening a large number of TCP connections to the web server. If the web server runs out of file descriptors, it triggers an exception and terminates the whole PowerDNS process. While it's more complicated for an unauthorized attacker to make the web server run out of file descriptors since its connection will be closed just after being accepted, it might still be possible.
How to mitigate CVE-2016-7072
Install update from vendor's website.