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HIGH

An UPDATE message flood may cause named to exhaust all available memory

Published Jan 25, 2023

Description

Sending a flood of dynamic DNS updates may cause `named` to allocate large amounts of memory. This, in turn, may cause `named` to exit due to a lack of free memory. We are not aware of any cases where this has been exploited.

Memory is allocated prior to the checking of access permissions (ACLs) and is retained during the processing of a dynamic update from a client whose access credentials are accepted. Memory allocated to clients that are not permitted to send updates is released immediately upon rejection. The scope of this vulnerability is limited therefore to trusted clients who are permitted to make dynamic zone changes.

If a dynamic update is REFUSED, memory will be released again very quickly. Therefore it is only likely to be possible to degrade or stop `named` by sending a flood of unaccepted dynamic updates comparable in magnitude to a query flood intended to achieve the same detrimental outcome.

BIND 9.11 and earlier branches are also affected, but through exhaustion of internal resources rather than memory constraints. This may reduce performance but should not be a significant problem for most servers. Therefore we don't intend to address this for BIND versions prior to BIND 9.16. This issue affects BIND 9 versions 9.16.0 through 9.16.36, 9.18.0 through 9.18.10, 9.19.0 through 9.19.8, and 9.16.8-S1 through 9.16.36-S1.

Affected products

Remediation

Vendor solution

Upgrade to the patched release most closely related to your current version of BIND 9: 9.16.37, 9.18.11, 9.19.9, or 9.16.37-S1.

Red Hat statement

Exploitation of this vulnerability is limited to trusted clients who are permitted to make dynamic zone changes. The impact on the 'named' service is directly related to the volume of requests being sent in. The service will recover to normal once an attacker stops sending dynamic updates. While a performance impact can be triggered, it is unlikely to result in a crash.

Metrics

References (5)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner isc
Published Jan 25, 2023
Updated Apr 1, 2025
Reserved Sep 2, 2022
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Apr 1, 2025
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Moderate
Public date Jan 25, 2023