A vulnerability named Non-Responsive Delegation Attack (NRDelegation Attack) has been discovered in various DNS resolving software. The NRDelegation Attack works by having a malicious delegation with a considerable number of non responsive nameservers. The attack starts by querying a resolver for a record that relies on those unresponsive nameservers. The attack can cause a resolver to spend a lot of time/resources resolving records under a malicious delegation point where a considerable number of unresponsive NS records reside. It can trigger high CPU usage in some resolver implementations that continually look in the cache for resolved NS records in that delegation. This can lead to degraded performance and eventually denial of service in orchestrated attacks. Unbound does not suffer from high CPU usage, but resources are still needed for resolving the malicious delegation. Unbound will keep trying to resolve the record until hard limits are reached. Based on the nature of the attack and the replies, different limits could be reached. From version 1.16.3 on, Unbound introduces fixes for better performance when under load, by cutting opportunistic queries for nameserver discovery and DNSKEY prefetching and limiting the number of times a delegation point can issue a cache lookup for missing records.
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource, thereby enabling an actor to influence the amount of resources consumed, eventually leading to the exhaustion of available resources.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unbound | Nlnetlabs | * | 1.16.2 (including) |
Limited resources include memory, file system storage, database connection pool entries, and CPU. If an attacker can trigger the allocation of these limited resources, but the number or size of the resources is not controlled, then the attacker could cause a denial of service that consumes all available resources. This would prevent valid users from accessing the product, and it could potentially have an impact on the surrounding environment. For example, a memory exhaustion attack against an application could slow down the application as well as its host operating system. There are at least three distinct scenarios which can commonly lead to resource exhaustion:
Resource exhaustion problems are often result due to an incorrect implementation of the following situations:
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either:
The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question.
The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute – and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.