Powerdns Recursor vulnerabilities
63 vulnerabilities
Known vulnerabilities in Powerdns Recursor, newest first, with CVSS severity, EPSS, KEV listings, ransomware use and the affected versions.
CVE-2018-16855debianpdns-recursor+3
EPSS score58.58%
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor before version 4.1.8 where a remote attacker sending a DNS query can trigger an out-of-bounds memory read while computing the hash of the query for a packet cache lookup, possibly leading to a crash.CVE-2018-1000003debianpdns-recursor+4EPSS score1.29%
Improper input validation bugs in DNSSEC validators components in PowerDNS version 4.1.0 allow attacker in man-in-the-middle position to deny existence of some data in DNS via packet replay.CVE-2018-14626debianpdns+7EPSS score2.72%
PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.1.0 up to 4.1.4 inclusive and PowerDNS Recursor 4.0.0 up to 4.1.4 inclusive are vulnerable to a packet cache pollution via crafted query that can lead to denial of service.CVE-2018-14644debianpdns-recursor+3EPSS score4.84%
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor from 4.0.0 up to and including 4.1.4. A remote attacker sending a DNS query for a meta-type like OPT can lead to a zone being wrongly cached as failing DNSSEC validation. It only arises if the parent zone is signed, and all the authoritative servers for that parent zone answer with FORMERR to a query for at least one of the meta-types. As a result, subsequent queries from clients requesting DNSSEC validation will be answered with a ServFail.CVE-2018-10851debianpdns+7EPSS score6.04%
PowerDNS Authoritative Server 3.3.0 up to 4.1.4 excluding 4.1.5 and 4.0.6, and PowerDNS Recursor 3.2 up to 4.1.4 excluding 4.1.5 and 4.0.9, are vulnerable to a memory leak while parsing malformed records that can lead to remote denial of service.CVE-2015-1868debianpdns+8EPSS score81.72%
The label decompression functionality in PowerDNS Recursor 3.5.x, 3.6.x before 3.6.3, and 3.7.x before 3.7.2 and Authoritative (Auth) Server 3.2.x, 3.3.x before 3.3.2, and 3.4.x before 3.4.4 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption or crash) via a request with a name that refers to itself.CVE-2015-5470debianpdns+4EPSS score11.28%
The label decompression functionality in PowerDNS Recursor before 3.6.4 and 3.7.x before 3.7.3 and Authoritative (Auth) Server before 3.3.3 and 3.4.x before 3.4.5 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption or crash) via a request with a long name that refers to itself. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2015-1868.CVE-2016-7073debianpdns+7EPSS score1.23%
An issue has been found in PowerDNS before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2, and PowerDNS recursor before 4.0.4, allowing an attacker in position of man-in-the-middle to alter the content of an AXFR because of insufficient validation of TSIG signatures. A missing check of the TSIG time and fudge values was found in AXFRRetriever, leading to a possible replay attack.CVE-2016-7074debianpdns+7EPSS score1.22%
An issue has been found in PowerDNS before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2, and PowerDNS recursor before 4.0.4, allowing an attacker in position of man-in-the-middle to alter the content of an AXFR because of insufficient validation of TSIG signatures. A missing check that the TSIG record is the last one, leading to the possibility of parsing records that are not covered by the TSIG signature.CVE-2016-7068debianpdns+8EPSS score7.29%
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.CVE-2025-59024debianpdns-recursor+2EPSS score0.14%
Crafted delegations or IP fragments can poison cached delegations in Recursor.CVE-2025-59023debianpdns-recursor+2EPSS score0.30%
Crafted delegations or IP fragments can poison cached delegations in Recursor.CVE-2025-59030debianpdns-recursor+2EPSS score0.58%
An attacker can trigger the removal of cached records by sending a NOTIFY query over TCP.CVE-2025-59029debianpdns-recursor+2EPSS score0.37%
An attacker can trigger an assertion failure by requesting crafted DNS records, waiting for them to be inserted into the records cache, then send a query with qtype set to ANY.CVE-2025-30195debianpdns-recursor+2EPSS score0.78%
An attacker can publish a zone containing specific Resource Record Sets. Processing and caching results for these sets can lead to an illegal memory accesses and crash of the Recursor, causing a denial of service.
The remedy is: upgrade to the patched 5.2.1 version.
We would like to thank Volodymyr Ilyin for bringing this issue to our attention.CVE-2020-14196debianpdns-recursor+8EPSS score1.70%
In PowerDNS Recursor versions up to and including 4.3.1, 4.2.2 and 4.1.16, the ACL restricting access to the internal web server is not properly enforced.CVE-2020-25829debianpdns-recursor+5EPSS score6.54%
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor before 4.1.18, 4.2.x before 4.2.5, and 4.3.x before 4.3.5. A remote attacker can cause the cached records for a given name to be updated to the Bogus DNSSEC validation state, instead of their actual DNSSEC Secure state, via a DNS ANY query. This results in a denial of service for installation that always validate (dnssec=validate), and for clients requesting validation when on-demand validation is enabled (dnssec=process).CVE-2020-10030debianpdns-recursor+2EPSS score23.89%
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor 4.1.0 up to and including 4.3.0. It allows an attacker (with enough privileges to change the system's hostname) to cause disclosure of uninitialized memory content via a stack-based out-of-bounds read. It only occurs on systems where gethostname() does not have '\0' termination of the returned string if the hostname is larger than the supplied buffer. (Linux systems are not affected because the buffer is always large enough. OpenBSD systems are not affected because the returned hostname always has '\0' termination.) Under some conditions, this issue can lead to the writing of one '\0' byte out-of-bounds on the stack, causing a denial of service or possibly arbitrary code execution.CVE-2020-10995debianpdns-recursor+6EPSS score4.48%
PowerDNS Recursor from 4.1.0 up to and including 4.3.0 does not sufficiently defend against amplification attacks. An issue in the DNS protocol has been found that allow malicious parties to use recursive DNS services to attack third party authoritative name servers. The attack uses a crafted reply by an authoritative name server to amplify the resulting traffic between the recursive and other authoritative name servers. Both types of service can suffer degraded performance as an effect. This is triggered by random subdomains in the NSDNAME in NS records. PowerDNS Recursor 4.1.16, 4.2.2 and 4.3.1 contain a mitigation to limit the impact of this DNS protocol issue.CVE-2020-12244debianpdns-recursor+6EPSS score2.43%
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor 4.1.0 through 4.3.0 where records in the answer section of a NXDOMAIN response lacking an SOA were not properly validated in SyncRes::processAnswer, allowing an attacker to bypass DNSSEC validation.