CVE-2018-5738 - CVE House
Back to Database
Status published Medium CVE-2018-5738

Some versions of BIND can improperly permit recursive query service to unauthorized clients

Vulnerability Description

Change #4777 (introduced in October 2017) introduced an unforeseen issue in releases which were issued after that date, affecting which clients are permitted to make recursive queries to a BIND nameserver. The intended (and documented) behavior is that if an operator has not specified a value for the "allow-recursion" setting, it SHOULD default to one of the following: none, if "recursion no;" is set in named.conf; a value inherited from the "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" settings IF "recursion yes;" (the default for that setting) AND match lists are explicitly set for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" (see the BIND9 Administrative Reference Manual section 6.2 for more details); or the intended default of "allow-recursion {localhost; localnets;};" if "recursion yes;" is in effect and no values are explicitly set for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query". However, because of the regression introduced by change #4777, it is possible when "recursion yes;" is in effect and no match list values are provided for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" for the setting of "allow-recursion" to inherit a setting of all hosts from the "allow-query" setting default, improperly permitting recursion to all clients. Affects BIND 9.9.12, 9.10.7, 9.11.3, 9.12.0->9.12.1-P2, the development release 9.13.0, and also releases 9.9.12-S1, 9.10.7-S1, 9.11.3-S1, and 9.11.3-S2 from BIND 9 Supported Preview Edition.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

THREAT MONITOR

Am I Vulnerable?

Launch our assessment wizard to check if your infrastructure is exposed to • CVE-2018-5738

Credits & Attribution

The following person or organization is credited with identifying this vulnerability, as recorded in the NVD database:

  • ISC would like to thank Andrew Skalski for reporting this issue.

Affected Vendor

Affected Software

BIND 9
Vulnerable Versions:
9.9.12, 9.10.7, 9.11.3, 9.12.0->9.12.1-P2, the development release 9.13.0, and also releases 9.9.12-S1, 9.10.7-S1, 9.11.3-S1, and 9.11.3-S2 from BIND 9 Supported Preview Edition.

Timeline

Official Publish: January 16th, 2019
Last Modified: September 16th, 2024
Added to House: July 20th, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N

Weaknesses (CWE)

No CWE data available

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

No associated TTPs found for this vulnerability.