CVE-2026-123581hickory-dns insufficient verification of data authenticity
CVE-2026-123581 is a insufficient verification of data authenticity in hickory-dns, rated medium (6.9 on CVSS 4.0).
Why this priority: Medium severity, with no exploitation signal.
Published · Updated · NVD status: Deferred
What it is
Data is accepted without proof it came from where it claims.
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
The direct impact is limited: partial access to data or a partial outage. In practice, this kind of flaw lets an attacker read or tamper with traffic, or pass a forged message as genuine.
Is it being exploited?
There is no public report of exploitation yet. It can be exploited automatically, at scale.
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-proto through 0.26.0-alpha.1 and hickory-net 0.26.0-beta.1 before 0.26.2 contain a DNSSEC validation flaw that accepts a response as a positive answer when any valid RRset appears in the answer section, without checking that the RRset is responsive to the query. Attackers can supply signed but unrelated RRsets so that responses lacking matching records are validated as positive answers instead of as no-data responses.
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
- TLS termination and service-to-service channels. The flaw sits on the network path between clients and services.
- Signature checks. The flaw sits on the network path between clients and services.
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.
- On the network path between clients and services. An attacker who crosses it can read or tamper with traffic, or pass a forged message as genuine.
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.