PowerDNS Blog

PowerDNS Security Advisory 2026-01

Written by Otto Moerbeek | Feb 9, 2026 1:45:00 PM

Today we have released PowerDNS Recursor 5.1.10, 5.2.8 and 5.3.5.

These releases fix a PowerDNS Security Advisory

  • 2026-01: Crafted zones can lead to increased resource usage in Recursor

There are two CVEs associated with this advisory, both of severity Medium.

  • CVE: CVE-2026-24027

  • Date: 9th February 2026

  • Affects: PowerDNS Recursor up and including to 5.1.9, 5.2.7 and 5.3.4

  • Not affected: PowerDNS Recursor 5.1.10, 5.2.8 and 5.3.5

  • Severity: Medium

  • Impact: Denial of Service

  • Exploit: This problem can be triggered by publishing and querying a crafted zone that causes increased incoming network traffic.

  • Risk of system compromise: None

  • Solution: Upgrade to patched version

CVSS Score: 5.3, see
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln-metrics/cvss/v3-calculator?vector=AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L&version=3.1

The remedy is: upgrade to a patched version.

We would like to thank Shuhan Zhang from Tsinghua University for bringing this issue to our attention.

  • CVE: CVE-2026-0398

  • Date: 9th February 2026

  • Affects: PowerDNS Recursor up and including to 5.1.9, 5.2.7 and 5.3.4

  • Not affected: PowerDNS Recursor 5.1.10, 5.2.8 and 5.3.5

  • Severity: Medium

  • Impact: Denial of Service

  • Exploit: This problem can be triggered by publishing and querying a crafted zone that causes large memory usage.

  • Risk of system compromise: None

  • Solution: Upgrade to patched version

CVSS Score: 5.3, see
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln-metrics/cvss/v3-calculator?vector=AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L&version=3.1

The remedy is: upgrade to a patched version.

We would like to thank Yufan You from Tsinghua University for bringing this issue to our attention.

We would also like to thank TaoFei Guo from Peking University and Yang Luo, JianJun Chen from Tsinghua University for bringing an issue of caching irrelevant records related to CNAME chains to our attention.

Please refer to the changelogs  (5.1.10, 5.2.8 and 5.3.5) for additional details

Please send us all feedback and issues you might have via the mailing list, or in case of a bug, via GitHub.

The tarballs (5.1.10, 5.2.8, 5.3.5) (with signature files 5.1.10, 5.2.8, 5.3.5) are available from our download server and packages for several distributions are available from our repository.

At the moment of writing, the patches are not incorporated yet in the public github repository. There has been a delay in the process to transfer them from our private repository (where they were developed) to the public repository.

Recently we made changes to our Open Source End of Life policy. Older release trains are now supported for one year after the following major release. Consult the EOL policy for more details.

We are grateful to the PowerDNS community for the reporting of bugs, issues, feature requests, and especially to the submitters of fixes and implementations of features.