PowerDNS Security Advisory 2025-03 for DNSdist: Denial of service via crafted TCP exchangeΒΆ

  • CVE: CVE-2025-30193
  • Date: 2025-05-20T13:00:00+02:00
  • Discovery date: 2025-05-13T11:13:00+02:00
  • Affects: PowerDNS DNSdist up to 1.9.9
  • Not affected: PowerDNS DNSdist 1.9.10
  • Severity: High
  • Impact: Denial of service
  • Exploit: This problem can be triggered by an attacker crafting a TCP exchange
  • Risk of system compromise: None
  • Solution: Upgrade to patched version or restrict the maximum number of queries on a single incoming TCP connection
  • CWE: CWE-674
  • CVSS: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
  • Last affected: 1.9.9
  • First fixed: 1.9.10
  • Internal ID: 299

In some circumstances, when DNSdist is configured to allow an unlimited number of queries on a single, incoming TCP connection from a client, an attacker can cause a denial of service by crafting a TCP exchange that triggers an exhaustion of the stack and a crash of DNSdist, causing a denial of service.

CVSS Score: 7.5

The remedy is: upgrade to the patched 1.9.10 version.

A workaround is to restrict the maximum number of queries on incoming TCP connections to a safe value, like 50, via the setMaxTCPQueriesPerConnection() setting.

We would like to thank Renaud Allard for bringing this issue to our attention.