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.
CVSS
No CVSS.
References
Configurations
No configuration.
History
20 Jul 2026, 21:16
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| References |
|
20 Jul 2026, 19:17
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| New CVE |
Information
Published : 2026-07-20 19:17
Updated : 2026-07-20 21:16
NVD link : CVE-2026-64194
Mitre link : CVE-2026-64194
CVE.ORG link : CVE-2026-64194
JSON object : View
Products Affected
No product.
CWE
CWE-674
Uncontrolled Recursion
