In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.20.0 up to and including 1.25.1, when Unbound is configured with 'serve-expired: yes' and 'serve-expired-client-timeout > discard-timeout > 0' (contrary to the suggested values), the discard-timeout branch during the serve expired logic drops an aged client reply without performing the correct accounting for the number of reply addresses for the query. Other identical branches outside of serve expired perform the correct decrement. Since the counter is never decremented in such scenario, it can reach the maximum limit and new clients for duplicate in-flight queries are silently dropped resulting in degradation of resolution service. A malicious actor can exploit the vulnerability by querying the resolver for a client-controlled slow-on-demand authoritative zone that can drive the counter past the threshold. Shipped defaults for 'serve-expired-client-timeout: 1800' and 'discard-timeout: 1900' make the branch unreachable.
CVE-2026-56444
This medium-severity CVE scores 5.9 under a secondary CVSS source (NVD's own analysis pending). EPSS exploit-prediction score not yet available (the EPSS model rescores nightly; freshly-published CVEs typically appear within 48 hours). GitHub Security Advisory data not yet ingested — confidence will rise once GHSA publishes (typical lag: hours to days for open-source ecosystem CVEs; never for infrastructure-only CVEs).
- Lower severity and no public exploit yet
No vendor fix yet — apply a workaround or compensating control (WAF / firewall / segmentation) and watch for a patch.
- CVSS v3
- 5.9
- EG Score
- 5.9(low)
- EPSS
- —
- KEV
- Not listed
Published
July 22, 2026
Last Modified
July 22, 2026
Advisory Details (1)
Auto-updated Jul 22, 2026Weakness Classification(1)
MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration — the root-cause categories this CVE belongs to.
Data Freshness Timeline
(refreshed 3× in last 7d / 3× in last 30d)
Each row is a source pipeline that fetched or updated this CVE on that date, with what changed. For example, "NVD update" means NVD published or revised its analysis for this CVE; "MITRE cvelistV5" means we ingested or refreshed it from the CNA feed. Most recent first.
- 2026-07-22 14:54 UTCEG score recompute
- 2026-07-22 13:17 UTCEG score recompute
- 2026-07-22 13:17 UTCMITRE cvelistV5first tracked
Related CVEs(same CWE)
Same CWE
10 shownCWE-772
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