Vulnerability in Nlnet Labs Unbound

CVE-2025-5994

A multi-vendor cache poisoning vulnerability named 'Rebirthday Attack' has been discovered in caching resolvers that support EDNS Client Subnet (ECS). Unbound is also vulnerable when compiled with ECS support, i.e., '--enable-subnet', AND configured to send ECS information along with queries to upstream name servers, i.e., at least one of the 'send-client-subnet', 'client-subnet-zone' or 'client-subnet-always-forward' options is used. Resolvers supporting ECS need to segregate outgoing queries to accommodate for different outgoing ECS information. This re-opens up resolvers to a birthday paradox attack (Rebirthday Attack) that tries to match the DNS transaction ID in order to cache non-ECS poisonous replies.

Published · last modified .

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (8.8th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 9th percentile — 8.8% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2025-5994: held from 0.002 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.002 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-5994?
CVE-2025-5994 is a vulnerability in Nlnet Labs Unbound, classified under CWE-349. Published 2025-07-16.
Is CVE-2025-5994 known to be exploited?
1 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.