Resource exhaustion in Nlnet Labs Unbound

CVE-2026-80225

In NLnetLabs Unbound up to and including 1.26.0, a degradation of service vulnerability is present in the TCP/DoT reading procedure where there is no limit on consecutive reads. A malicious actor that can stream and sustain a rate of distinct uncached names over the TCP/DoT connection, monopolizes a single worker's entire event loop for as long as its writes stay ahead of the drain.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.3 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (41.6th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 42nd percentile — 41.6% 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-2026-80225: held from 0.005 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.005 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-80225?
CVE-2026-80225 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Nlnet Labs Unbound, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 5.3/10. Published 2026-09-16.
How severe is CVE-2026-80225?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.3 out of 10.