When NLnet Labs Unbound 1.0.1 up to and including version 1.26.1 is configured with both a root trust anchor and an additional 'trust-anchor:' for an island-of-security zone whose parent is provably insecure under the root chain, a malicious actor with a forged NSEC reply with the SOA bit cleared can trick Unbound to treat the configured trust island as insecure. This happens because the DNSSEC validator in Unbound accepts and caches the NSEC insecure response bypassing the RRSIG validation that the validator was supposed to do. The acceptance of the NSEC record at the trust anchor apex was allowed due to and old fix for type DS and NSEC queries from clients when trust anchor for that name existed.
Metrics
Affected Vendors & Products
Advisories
No advisories yet.
Fixes
Solution
This issue is fixed starting with version 1.26.2
Workaround
No workaround given by the vendor.
References
History
Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| Description | When NLnet Labs Unbound 1.0.1 up to and including version 1.26.1 is configured with both a root trust anchor and an additional 'trust-anchor:' for an island-of-security zone whose parent is provably insecure under the root chain, a malicious actor with a forged NSEC reply with the SOA bit cleared can trick Unbound to treat the configured trust island as insecure. This happens because the DNSSEC validator in Unbound accepts and caches the NSEC insecure response bypassing the RRSIG validation that the validator was supposed to do. The acceptance of the NSEC record at the trust anchor apex was allowed due to and old fix for type DS and NSEC queries from clients when trust anchor for that name existed. | |
| Title | Bypass of a configured island trust anchor underneath an insecure parent from an atacker-controlled NSEC record. | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-354 | |
| References |
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| Metrics |
cvssV3_1
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Projects
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Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: NLnet Labs
Published:
Updated: 2026-10-21T08:56:55.811Z
Reserved: 2026-06-22T10:11:10.543Z
Link: CVE-2026-35501
No data.
Status : Received
Published: 2026-10-21T09:17:07.373
Modified: 2026-10-21T09:17:07.373
Link: CVE-2026-35501
No data.
OpenCVE Enrichment
Updated: 2026-10-21T16:00:15Z
Weaknesses