CVE-2020-8616 - CVE House
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Status published High CVE-2020-8616

BIND does not sufficiently limit the number of fetches performed when processing referrals

Vulnerability Description

A malicious actor who intentionally exploits this lack of effective limitation on the number of fetches performed when processing referrals can, through the use of specially crafted referrals, cause a recursing server to issue a very large number of fetches in an attempt to process the referral. This has at least two potential effects: The performance of the recursing server can potentially be degraded by the additional work required to perform these fetches, and The attacker can exploit this behavior to use the recursing server as a reflector in a reflection attack with a high amplification factor.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

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

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Credits & Attribution

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

  • ISC would like to thank Lior Shafir and Yehuda Afek of Tel Aviv University and Anat Bremler-Barr of Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya for discovering and reporting this issue.

References

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Affected Vendor

Affected Software

BIND9
Vulnerable Versions:
9.0.0 -> 9.11.18, 9.12.0 -> 9.12.4-P2, 9.14.0 -> 9.14.11, 9.16.0 -> 9.16.2, and releases 9.17.0 -> 9.17.1 of the 9.17 experimental development branch. All releases in the obsolete 9.13 and 9.15 development branches. All releases of BIND Supported Preview Edition from 9.9.3-S1 -> 9.11.18-S1

Timeline

Official Publish: May 19th, 2020
Last Modified: September 16th, 2024
Added to House: July 21st, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

Weaknesses (CWE)

No CWE data available

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

No associated TTPs found for this vulnerability.