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VulnerabilityPublished

hickory-proto vulnerable to CPU exhaustion during message encoding due to O(n²) name compression

Affects hickory-protoSource GCVE Database

0

Mentioned vulnerabilities

CVSS 6.9 Medium : upgrade to 0.26.1 when convenient.

Data as of 27 Oct 2026, 00:07 UTC

CVSS 4.0 base score
6.9Medium
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.
Patch
Available – fixed in 0.26.1
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

What to do

Upgrade hickory-proto to 0.26.1.

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
crates.iohickory-protoAffected
  • >=0.3.1 <0.26.1
Fixed in
  • 0.26.1

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Description

During message encoding, `hickory-proto`'s `BinEncoder` stores pointers to labels that are candidates for name compression in a `Vec<(usize, Vec<u8>)>`. The name compression logic then searches for matches with a linear scan. A malicious message with many records can both introduce many candidate labels, and invoke this linear scan many times. This can amplify CPU exhaustion in DoS attacks. This is similar to [CVE-2024-8508](https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/CVE-2024-8508.txt). ### Reporter Qifan Zhang, Palo Alto Networks

References

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