Public vulnerability disclosure

CVE-2026-123588

Hickory DNS Recursive Resolver Denial of Service via Cached Empty Connection Pool

publishedCWE-754

The recursive resolver in Hickory DNS (all versions of the hickory-recursor crate, and hickory-resolver 0.26.0 before 0.26.2) caches an empty connection pool when it follows a referral with no glue records and all queries for the name servers' IP addresses fail. An attacker able to spoof DNS responses can make these lookups fail, causing all subsequent queries for the affected zone to fail until the cache entry expires or is evicted.

Technical severity8.7 highCVSS 4.0 · CNA: VulnCheck
Published2026-11-08Source updated 2026-11-08
Collected2026-11-081 attributed source

Fixes and workarounds

No remediation reported in collected sources.

Missing remediation information is not evidence that no patch exists.

Affected products and versions

Affected products, source version ranges and reporting authorities
ProductVersionsAuthority
hickory-dns
hickory-dns
hickory-recursor
cargo
≥ 0; ≤ 0.26.0-alpha.1 (affected, semver)
Other versions: unaffected
CNA: VulnCheck
hickory-dns
hickory-dns
hickory-resolver
cargo
≥ 0.26.0; < 0.26.2 (affected, semver)
0.26.2 (unaffected, semver)
Other versions: unaffected
CNA: VulnCheck

Version ranges are source assertions. Check the vendor advisory and your installed configuration before determining exposure.

CVSS assessments

CVSS scores, vectors and reporting authorities
Version / scoreVectorAuthority
4.0 / 8.7
high
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:NCNA: VulnCheck
3.1 / 7.5
high
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HCNA: VulnCheck

Exploit evidence

No exploit evidence in collected sources. This is not proof of no exploitation.

References

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