CVE-2026-64194 (GCVE-0-2026-64194)
Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2026-07-20 17:55 – Updated: 2026-08-30 20:06
VLAI
EPSS
VEX
Title
Net::DNS versions through 1.55 for Perl allow Denial of Service via deep DNS compression pointer chains
Summary
Net::DNS versions through 1.55 for Perl allow Denial of Service via deep DNS compression pointer chains.
Net::DNS::DomainName::decode follows RFC 1035 compression pointers by recursing into itself with no depth limit. It is possible to construct a name which saturates the call stack (at least with larger TCP responses), leading to a potential Denial of Service.
The guard `$link < $offset` prevents forward and circular chains, but still allows arbitrarily long backward chains. The per-offset cache (`$cache`) is populated at the start of each call and short-circuits only re-traverses of the same offset - the initial descent through a fresh chain still recurses at full depth.
A crafted packet can chain two-byte compression pointers so that each one points two bytes earlier than the previous, producing a chain length of `offset / 2`. For the 14-bit pointer field (max offset 16383) this gives up to ~8191 recursive frames. For a TCP DNS message the limit is the 16-bit length field (~32767 frames). Perl's default C stack handles only a few thousand frames; beyond that the process receives SIGSEGV or similar, which is a denial-of-service for any application parsing untrusted DNS data.
The vulnerability is triggered by `Net::DNS::Packet->new(\$wire)` i.e. any point where the library decodes a DNS message from the network.
Severity
7.5 (High)
SSVC
Exploitation: none
Automatable: yes
Technical Impact: partial
CISA Coordinator · CISA-ADP (v2.0.3)
Decision recorded 2026-07-21 18:55 UTC
CWE
- CWE-674 - Uncontrolled Recursion
Assigner
CPANSec
CNA
References
5 references
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