CVE-2026-123580hickory-dns authentication bypass by spoofing
CVE-2026-123580 is a authentication bypass by spoofing in hickory-dns, rated high (8.7 on CVSS 4.0).
Why this priority: High severity, with no exploitation signal yet.
Published · Updated · NVD status: Deferred
What it is
Identity is trusted from something an attacker can fake, such as an address or header.
How it is reached
An attacker can exploit it over the network, without an account, and nobody has to click anything.
What an attacker gains
A successful attack can change data or behaviour. In practice, this kind of flaw lets an attacker act as a signed-in user, or an administrator, without valid credentials.
Is it being exploited?
There is no public report of exploitation yet.
What to do
- Upgrade hickory-dns to 0.26.2 or later.
- Until it is patched, keep it off the internet or behind a VPN, allowlist or authenticating proxy.
Description from NVD
Hickory DNS hickory-net 0.26.0-beta.1 before 0.26.2 and hickory-proto through 0.26.0-alpha.1 perform insufficient checks on NSEC3 record names during DNSSEC verification, comparing only the hashed label without confirming the record belongs to the correct zone. Attackers can supply NSEC3 records from another zone with a matching hash label to forge DNSSEC nonexistence proofs.
What this means for your architecture.
A CVE names a product. Whether it matters depends on where that product sits in your systems: what reaches it, which trust boundary it guards and what it can reach once compromised. Veriom maps your components, their relationships and your trust boundaries from your code, cloud and delivery evidence, so you can see where a component like this sits. The radar itself does not look at your systems.
Components it touches
- Sign-in, session and token handling. The flaw sits between anonymous callers and authenticated sessions.
- Identity providers and SSO. The flaw sits between anonymous callers and authenticated sessions.
Trust boundaries in play
- Internet-facing entry points. No account is needed. Any instance reachable from outside your perimeter, through a load balancer, gateway, VPN or exposed admin port, is in scope.
- Between anonymous callers and authenticated sessions. An attacker who crosses it can act as a signed-in user, or an administrator, without valid credentials.
Questions to answer about your own systems
- Where does hickory-dns run in your systems, and at which version?
- Which of those instances can be reached from the internet or partner networks?
- What can it reach once compromised: which data stores, secrets and services?
Sources
- CVE records and CVSS scores from the NVD CVE API. This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.
- Exploitation status from CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
- Exploit likelihood from FIRST’s Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), refreshed daily.
- Explanations are written by Veriom from fixed templates over each record’s data, not by a person reviewing each CVE. Descriptions are quoted from the records as published.