Description
When NLnet Labs Unbound 1.0.1 up to and including version 1.26.1 is configured with both a root trust anchor and an additional 'trust-anchor:' for an island-of-security zone whose parent is provably insecure under the root chain, a malicious actor with a forged NSEC reply with the SOA bit cleared can trick Unbound to treat the configured trust island as insecure. This happens because the DNSSEC validator in Unbound accepts and caches the NSEC insecure response bypassing the RRSIG validation that the validator was supposed to do. The acceptance of the NSEC record at the trust anchor apex was allowed due to and old fix for type DS and NSEC queries from clients when trust anchor for that name existed.
Published: 2026-10-21
Score: 3.7 Low
EPSS: n/a
KEV: No
Impact: n/a
Action: n/a
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Remediation

Vendor Solution

This issue is fixed starting with version 1.26.2

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History

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description When NLnet Labs Unbound 1.0.1 up to and including version 1.26.1 is configured with both a root trust anchor and an additional 'trust-anchor:' for an island-of-security zone whose parent is provably insecure under the root chain, a malicious actor with a forged NSEC reply with the SOA bit cleared can trick Unbound to treat the configured trust island as insecure. This happens because the DNSSEC validator in Unbound accepts and caches the NSEC insecure response bypassing the RRSIG validation that the validator was supposed to do. The acceptance of the NSEC record at the trust anchor apex was allowed due to and old fix for type DS and NSEC queries from clients when trust anchor for that name existed.
Title Bypass of a configured island trust anchor underneath an insecure parent from an atacker-controlled NSEC record.
Weaknesses CWE-354
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 3.7, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N'}


Subscriptions

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: NLnet Labs

Published:

Updated: 2026-10-21T08:56:55.811Z

Reserved: 2026-06-22T10:11:10.543Z

Link: CVE-2026-35501

cve-icon Vulnrichment

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cve-icon NVD

Status : Received

Published: 2026-10-21T09:17:07.373

Modified: 2026-10-21T09:17:07.373

Link: CVE-2026-35501

cve-icon Redhat

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cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

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Weaknesses
  • CWE-354

    Improper Validation of Integrity Check Value