coredns.io CVE Vulnerabilities & Metrics

CoreDNS is a DNS server written in Go. In versions prior to 1.14.3, the gRPC, QUIC, DoH, and DoH3 transport implementations incorrectly handle TSIG authentication. For gRPC and QUIC, the server checks whether the TSIG key name exists in the configuration but never calls dns.TsigVerify() to validate the HMAC. If the key name matches a configured key, the tsigStatus field remains nil and the tsig plugin treats the request as successfully authenticated regardless of the MAC value. For DoH and DoH3, the issue is more severe: the DoHWriter.TsigStatus() method unconditionally returns nil, and the server never inspects the TSIG record at all. Any request containing a TSIG record is treated as authenticated over DoH and DoH3, even if the key name is invalid and the MAC is arbitrary. An unauthenticated network attacker can exploit this to bypass TSIG-protected functionality such as AXFR/IXFR zone transfers, dynamic DNS updates, or other TSIG-gated plugin behavior. The DoH and DoH3 variants have a lower exploitation bar because the attacker does not need to know a valid TSIG key name. This issue has been fixed in version 1.14.3. As a workaround, disable gRPC, QUIC, DoH, and DoH3 listeners where TSIG authentication is required, or restrict network-level access to affected transport ports to trusted sources only.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. In versions prior to 1.14.3, the transfer plugin can select the wrong ACL stanza when both a parent zone and a more-specific subzone are configured. The longestMatch() function in plugin/transfer/transfer.go uses a lexicographic string comparison instead of an actual longest-suffix match to select the winning zone. As a result, a permissive parent-zone transfer rule can override a restrictive subzone rule depending on zone name ordering (e.g., "example.org." > "a.example.org." lexicographically). This allows an unauthorized remote client to perform AXFR/IXFR for the subzone and retrieve its full zone contents. This issue has been fixed in version 1.14.3.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. In versions prior to 1.14.3, the tsig plugin can be bypassed on non-plain-DNS transports (DoT, DoH, DoH3, DoQ, and gRPC) because it trusts the transport writer's TsigStatus() instead of performing verification itself. The DoH and DoH3 writer's TsigStatus() always returns nil, the DoT server does not set TsigSecret on the dns.Server, and the DoQ and gRPC writers also unconditionally return nil. This allows an unauthenticated remote client to bypass TSIG-based authentication and access resources intended to be restricted behind a tsig require all policy. Plain DNS over TCP and UDP are not affected. This issue has been fixed in version 1.14.3.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. In versions prior to 1.14.3, the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) GET path accepts oversized dns= query parameter values and performs URL query parsing, base64 decoding, and DNS message unpacking before rejecting the request. Unlike the POST path, which applies a bounded read via http.MaxBytesReader limited to 65536 bytes, the GET path has no equivalent size validation before expensive processing. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can repeatedly send oversized DoH GET requests to force high CPU usage, large transient memory allocations, and elevated garbage-collection pressure, leading to denial of service. This issue has been fixed in version 1.14.3.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. In versions prior to 1.14.3, the DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) server can be driven into unbounded goroutine and memory growth by a remote client that opens many QUIC streams and sends only 1 byte per stream. When the worker pool is full, CoreDNS still spawns a goroutine per accepted stream to wait for a worker token. Additionally, active workers block indefinitely in io.ReadFull() with no per-stream read deadline, allowing an attacker to pin all workers by sending a single byte so the read blocks waiting for the second byte of the DoQ length prefix. This enables an unauthenticated remote attacker to cause memory exhaustion and OOM-kill. This issue has been fixed in version 1.14.3. No known workarounds exist.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. Prior to version 1.14.2, a denial of service vulnerability exists in CoreDNS's loop detection plugin that allows an attacker to crash the DNS server by sending specially crafted DNS queries. The vulnerability stems from the use of a predictable pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) for generating a secret query name, combined with a fatal error handler that terminates the entire process. This issue has been patched in version 1.14.2.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. Prior to version 1.14.2, a logical vulnerability in CoreDNS allows DNS access controls to be bypassed due to the default execution order of plugins. Security plugins such as acl are evaluated before the rewrite plugin, resulting in a Time-of-Check Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) flaw. This issue has been patched in version 1.14.2.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. Prior to version 1.14.0, multiple CoreDNS server implementations (gRPC, HTTPS, and HTTP/3) lack critical resource-limiting controls. An unauthenticated remote attacker can exhaust memory and degrade or crash the server by opening many concurrent connections, streams, or sending oversized request bodies. The issue is similar in nature to CVE-2025-47950 (QUIC DoS) but affects additional server types that do not enforce connection limits, stream limits, or message size constraints. Version 1.14.0 contains a patch.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. In versions prior to 1.12.2, a Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability exists in the CoreDNS DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) server implementation. The server previously created a new goroutine for every incoming QUIC stream without imposing any limits on the number of concurrent streams or goroutines. A remote, unauthenticated attacker could open a large number of streams, leading to uncontrolled memory consumption and eventually causing an Out Of Memory (OOM) crash — especially in containerized or memory-constrained environments. The patch in version 1.12.2 introduces two key mitigation mechanisms: `max_streams`, which caps the number of concurrent QUIC streams per connection with a default value of `256`; and `worker_pool_size`, which Introduces a server-wide, bounded worker pool to process incoming streams with a default value of `1024`. This eliminates the 1:1 stream-to-goroutine model and ensures that CoreDNS remains resilient under high concurrency. Some workarounds are available for those who are unable to upgrade. Disable QUIC support by removing or commenting out the `quic://` block in the Corefile, use container runtime resource limits to detect and isolate excessive memory usage, and/or monitor QUIC connection patterns and alert on anomalies.

CoreDNS through 1.10.1 enables attackers to achieve DNS cache poisoning and inject fake responses via a birthday attack.

An issue was discovered in CoreDNS through 1.10.1. There is a vulnerability in DNS resolving software, which triggers a resolver to ignore valid responses, thus causing denial of service for normal resolution. In an exploit, the attacker could just forge a response targeting the source port of a vulnerable resolver without the need to guess the correct TXID.

A flaw was found in coreDNS. This flaw allows a malicious user to redirect traffic intended for external top-level domains (TLD) to a pod they control by creating projects and namespaces that match the TLD.

A flaw was found in coreDNS. This flaw allows a malicious user to reroute internal calls to some internal services that were accessed by the FQDN in a format of <service>.<namespace>.svc.