Focus on powerdns vulnerabilities and metrics.
Last updated: 08 Mar 2025, 23:25 UTC
This page consolidates all known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) associated with powerdns. We track both calendar-based metrics (using fixed periods) and rolling metrics (using gliding windows) to give you a comprehensive view of security trends and risk evolution. Use these insights to assess risk and plan your patching strategy.
For a broader perspective on cybersecurity threats, explore the comprehensive list of CVEs by vendor and product. Stay updated on critical vulnerabilities affecting major software and hardware providers.
Total powerdns CVEs: 48
Earliest CVE date: 02 May 2005, 04:00 UTC
Latest CVE date: 14 Feb 2024, 16:15 UTC
Latest CVE reference: CVE-2023-50387
30-day Count (Rolling): 0
365-day Count (Rolling): 0
Calendar-based Variation
Calendar-based Variation compares a fixed calendar period (e.g., this month versus the same month last year), while Rolling Growth Rate uses a continuous window (e.g., last 30 days versus the previous 30 days) to capture trends independent of calendar boundaries.
Month Variation (Calendar): 0%
Year Variation (Calendar): -100.0%
Month Growth Rate (30-day Rolling): 0.0%
Year Growth Rate (365-day Rolling): -100.0%
Average CVSS: 5.07
Max CVSS: 10.0
Critical CVEs (≥9): 2
Range | Count |
---|---|
0.0-3.9 | 6 |
4.0-6.9 | 51 |
7.0-8.9 | 6 |
9.0-10.0 | 2 |
These are the five CVEs with the highest CVSS scores for powerdns, sorted by severity first and recency.
Certain DNSSEC aspects of the DNS protocol (in RFC 4033, 4034, 4035, 6840, and related RFCs) allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) via one or more DNSSEC responses, aka the "KeyTrap" issue. One of the concerns is that, when there is a zone with many DNSKEY and RRSIG records, the protocol specification implies that an algorithm must evaluate all combinations of DNSKEY and RRSIG records.
Denial of service vulnerability in PowerDNS Recursor allows authoritative servers to be marked unavailable.This issue affects Recursor: through 4.6.5, through 4.7.4 , through 4.8.3.
A remote attacker might be able to cause infinite recursion in PowerDNS Recursor 4.8.0 via a DNS query that retrieves DS records for a misconfigured domain, because QName minimization is used in QM fallback mode. This is fixed in 4.8.1.
PowerDNS Recursor up to and including 4.5.9, 4.6.2 and 4.7.1, when protobuf logging is enabled, has Improper Cleanup upon a Thrown Exception, leading to a denial of service (daemon crash) via a DNS query that leads to an answer with specific properties.
In PowerDNS Authoritative Server before 4.4.3, 4.5.x before 4.5.4, and 4.6.x before 4.6.1 and PowerDNS Recursor before 4.4.8, 4.5.x before 4.5.8, and 4.6.x before 4.6.1, insufficient validation of an IXFR end condition causes incomplete zone transfers to be handled as successful transfers.
PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.5.0 before 4.5.1 allows anybody to crash the process by sending a specific query (QTYPE 65535) that causes an out-of-bounds exception.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor before 4.1.18, 4.2.x before 4.2.5, and 4.3.x before 4.3.5. A remote attacker can cause the cached records for a given name to be updated to the Bogus DNSSEC validation state, instead of their actual DNSSEC Secure state, via a DNS ANY query. This results in a denial of service for installation that always validate (dnssec=validate), and for clients requesting validation when on-demand validation is enabled (dnssec=process).
An issue was discovered in PowerDNS Authoritative through 4.3.0 when --enable-experimental-gss-tsig is used. A remote, unauthenticated attacker might be able to cause a double-free, leading to a crash or possibly arbitrary code execution. by sending crafted queries with a GSS-TSIG signature.
An issue was discovered in PowerDNS Authoritative through 4.3.0 when --enable-experimental-gss-tsig is used. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can cause a denial of service by sending crafted queries with a GSS-TSIG signature.
An issue was discovered in PowerDNS Authoritative through 4.3.0 when --enable-experimental-gss-tsig is used. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can trigger a race condition leading to a crash, or possibly arbitrary code execution, by sending crafted queries with a GSS-TSIG signature.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server before 4.3.1 where an authorized user with the ability to insert crafted records into a zone might be able to leak the content of uninitialized memory.
In PowerDNS Recursor versions up to and including 4.3.1, 4.2.2 and 4.1.16, the ACL restricting access to the internal web server is not properly enforced.
PowerDNS Recursor from 4.1.0 up to and including 4.3.0 does not sufficiently defend against amplification attacks. An issue in the DNS protocol has been found that allow malicious parties to use recursive DNS services to attack third party authoritative name servers. The attack uses a crafted reply by an authoritative name server to amplify the resulting traffic between the recursive and other authoritative name servers. Both types of service can suffer degraded performance as an effect. This is triggered by random subdomains in the NSDNAME in NS records. PowerDNS Recursor 4.1.16, 4.2.2 and 4.3.1 contain a mitigation to limit the impact of this DNS protocol issue.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor 4.1.0 up to and including 4.3.0. It allows an attacker (with enough privileges to change the system's hostname) to cause disclosure of uninitialized memory content via a stack-based out-of-bounds read. It only occurs on systems where gethostname() does not have '\0' termination of the returned string if the hostname is larger than the supplied buffer. (Linux systems are not affected because the buffer is always large enough. OpenBSD systems are not affected because the returned hostname always has '\0' termination.) Under some conditions, this issue can lead to the writing of one '\0' byte out-of-bounds on the stack, causing a denial of service or possibly arbitrary code execution.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor 4.1.0 through 4.3.0 where records in the answer section of a NXDOMAIN response lacking an SOA were not properly validated in SyncRes::processAnswer, allowing an attacker to bypass DNSSEC validation.
The DNS packet parsing/generation code in PowerDNS (aka pdns) Authoritative Server 3.4.x before 3.4.6 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via crafted query packets.
PowerDNS Authoritative daemon , pdns versions 4.0.x before 4.0.9, 4.1.x before 4.1.11, exiting when encountering a serial between 2^31 and 2^32-1 while trying to notify a slave leads to DoS.
A Vulnerability has been found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server before versions 4.1.9, 4.0.8 allowing a remote, authorized master server to cause a high CPU load or even prevent any further updates to any slave zone by sending a large number of NOTIFY messages. Note that only servers configured as slaves are affected by this issue.
A vulnerability has been found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server before versions 4.1.10, 4.0.8 allowing an authorized user to cause the server to exit by inserting a crafted record in a MASTER type zone under their control. The issue is due to the fact that the Authoritative Server will exit when it runs into a parsing error while looking up the NS/A/AAAA records it is about to use for an outgoing notify.
A vulnerability was found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server before 4.0.7 and before 4.1.7. An insufficient validation of data coming from the user when building a HTTP request from a DNS query in the HTTP Connector of the Remote backend, allowing a remote user to cause a denial of service by making the server connect to an invalid endpoint, or possibly information disclosure by making the server connect to an internal endpoint and somehow extracting meaningful information about the response
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor versions 4.1.x before 4.1.9 where records in the answer section of responses received from authoritative servers with the AA flag not set were not properly validated, allowing an attacker to bypass DNSSEC validation.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor versions after 4.1.3 before 4.1.9 where Lua hooks are not properly applied to queries received over TCP in some specific combination of settings, possibly bypassing security policies enforced using Lua.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor before version 4.1.8 where a remote attacker sending a DNS query can trigger an out-of-bounds memory read while computing the hash of the query for a packet cache lookup, possibly leading to a crash.
PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.1.0 up to 4.1.4 inclusive and PowerDNS Recursor 4.0.0 up to 4.1.4 inclusive are vulnerable to a packet cache pollution via crafted query that can lead to denial of service.
PowerDNS Authoritative Server 3.3.0 up to 4.1.4 excluding 4.1.5 and 4.0.6, and PowerDNS Recursor 3.2 up to 4.1.4 excluding 4.1.5 and 4.0.9, are vulnerable to a memory leak while parsing malformed records that can lead to remote denial of service.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS DNSDist before 1.3.3 allowing a remote attacker to craft a DNS query with trailing data such that the addition of a record by dnsdist, for example an OPT record when adding EDNS Client Subnet, might result in the trailing data being smuggled to the backend as a valid record while not seen by dnsdist. This is an issue when dnsdist is deployed as a DNS Firewall and used to filter some records that should not be received by the backend. This issue occurs only when either the 'useClientSubnet' or the experimental 'addXPF' parameters are used when declaring a new backend.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor from 4.0.0 up to and including 4.1.4. A remote attacker sending a DNS query for a meta-type like OPT can lead to a zone being wrongly cached as failing DNSSEC validation. It only arises if the parent zone is signed, and all the authoritative servers for that parent zone answer with FORMERR to a query for at least one of the meta-types. As a result, subsequent queries from clients requesting DNSSEC validation will be answered with a ServFail.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server versions up to and including 3.4.10, 4.0.1 allowing an authorized user to crash the server by inserting a specially crafted record in a zone under their control then sending a DNS query for that record. The issue is due to an integer overflow when checking if the content of the record matches the expected size, allowing an attacker to cause a read past the buffer boundary.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2, and PowerDNS recursor before 4.0.4, allowing an attacker in position of man-in-the-middle to alter the content of an AXFR because of insufficient validation of TSIG signatures. A missing check that the TSIG record is the last one, leading to the possibility of parsing records that are not covered by the TSIG signature.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2, and PowerDNS recursor before 4.0.4, allowing an attacker in position of man-in-the-middle to alter the content of an AXFR because of insufficient validation of TSIG signatures. A missing check of the TSIG time and fudge values was found in AXFRRetriever, leading to a possible replay attack.
An issue has been found in dnsdist before 1.2.0 in the way EDNS0 OPT records are handled when parsing responses from a backend. When dnsdist is configured to add EDNS Client Subnet to a query, the response may contain an EDNS0 OPT record that has to be removed before forwarding the response to the initial client. On a 32-bit system, the pointer arithmetic used when parsing the received response to remove that record might trigger an undefined behavior leading to a crash.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2, and PowerDNS recursor before 3.7.4 and 4.0.4, allowing a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause an abnormal CPU usage load on the PowerDNS server by sending crafted DNS queries, which might result in a partial denial of service if the system becomes overloaded. This issue is based on the fact that the PowerDNS server parses all records present in a query regardless of whether they are needed or even legitimate. A specially crafted query containing a large number of records can be used to take advantage of that behaviour.
An issue has been found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2 allowing a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service by opening a large number of TCP connections to the web server. If the web server runs out of file descriptors, it triggers an exception and terminates the whole PowerDNS process. While it's more complicated for an unauthorized attacker to make the web server run out of file descriptors since its connection will be closed just after being accepted, it might still be possible.
An issue has been found in the parsing of authoritative answers in PowerDNS Recursor before 4.0.8, leading to a NULL pointer dereference when parsing a specially crafted answer containing a CNAME of a different class than IN. An unauthenticated remote attacker could cause a denial of service.
pdns before version 4.1.2 is vulnerable to a buffer overflow in dnsreplay. In the dnsreplay tool provided with PowerDNS Authoritative, replaying a specially crafted PCAP file can trigger a stack-based buffer overflow, leading to a crash and potentially arbitrary code execution. This buffer overflow only occurs when the -ecs-stamp option of dnsreplay is used.
An issue has been found in the DNSSEC parsing code of PowerDNS Recursor from 4.0.0 up to and including 4.0.6 leading to a memory leak when parsing specially crafted DNSSEC ECDSA keys. These keys are only parsed when validation is enabled by setting dnssec to a value other than off or process-no-validate (default).
When api-config-dir is set to a non-empty value, which is not the case by default, the API in PowerDNS Recursor 4.x up to and including 4.0.6 and 3.x up to and including 3.7.4 allows an authorized user to update the Recursor's ACL by adding and removing netmasks, and to configure forward zones. It was discovered that the new netmask and IP addresses of forwarded zones were not sufficiently validated, allowing an authenticated user to inject new configuration directives into the Recursor's configuration.
A cross-site scripting issue has been found in the web interface of PowerDNS Recursor from 4.0.0 up to and including 4.0.6, where the qname of DNS queries was displayed without any escaping, allowing a remote attacker to inject HTML and Javascript code into the web interface, altering the content.
An issue has been found in the API component of PowerDNS Authoritative 4.x up to and including 4.0.4 and 3.x up to and including 3.4.11, where some operations that have an impact on the state of the server are still allowed even though the API has been configured as read-only via the api-readonly keyword. This missing check allows an attacker with valid API credentials to flush the cache, trigger a zone transfer or send a NOTIFY.
An issue has been found in the DNSSEC validation component of PowerDNS Recursor from 4.0.0 and up to and including 4.0.6, where the signatures might have been accepted as valid even if the signed data was not in bailiwick of the DNSKEY used to sign it. This allows an attacker in position of man-in-the-middle to alter the content of records by issuing a valid signature for the crafted records.
Improper input validation bugs in DNSSEC validators components in PowerDNS version 4.1.0 allow attacker in man-in-the-middle position to deny existence of some data in DNS via packet replay.
dnsdist version 1.1.0 is vulnerable to a flaw in authentication mechanism for REST API potentially allowing CSRF attack.
PowerDNS (aka pdns) Authoritative Server before 4.0.1 allows remote primary DNS servers to cause a denial of service (memory exhaustion and secondary DNS server crash) via a large (1) AXFR or (2) IXFR response.
PowerDNS (aka pdns) Authoritative Server before 3.4.10 does not properly handle a . (dot) inside labels, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (backend CPU consumption) via a crafted DNS query.
PowerDNS (aka pdns) Authoritative Server before 3.4.10 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (backend CPU consumption) via a long qname.
PowerDNS (aka pdns) Authoritative Server 3.4.4 before 3.4.7 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (assertion failure and server crash) via crafted query packets.
The label decompression functionality in PowerDNS Recursor before 3.6.4 and 3.7.x before 3.7.3 and Authoritative (Auth) Server before 3.3.3 and 3.4.x before 3.4.5 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption or crash) via a request with a long name that refers to itself. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2015-1868.
The label decompression functionality in PowerDNS Recursor 3.5.x, 3.6.x before 3.6.3, and 3.7.x before 3.7.2 and Authoritative (Auth) Server 3.2.x, 3.3.x before 3.3.2, and 3.4.x before 3.4.4 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption or crash) via a request with a name that refers to itself.
PowerDNS Recursor before 3.6.2 does not limit delegation chaining, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service ("performance degradations") via a large or infinite number of referrals, as demonstrated by resolving domains hosted by ezdns.it.
Unspecified vulnerability in PowerDNS Recursor (aka pdns_recursor) 3.6.x before 3.6.1 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via an unknown sequence of malformed packets.
The resolver in PowerDNS Recursor (aka pdns_recursor) 3.3 overwrites cached server names and TTL values in NS records during the processing of a response to an A record query, which allows remote attackers to trigger continued resolvability of revoked domain names via a "ghost domain names" attack.
common_startup.cc in PowerDNS (aka pdns) Authoritative Server before 2.9.22.5 and 3.x before 3.0.1 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (packet loop) via a crafted UDP DNS response.
Unspecified vulnerability in PowerDNS Recursor before 3.1.7.2 allows remote attackers to spoof DNS data via crafted zones.
Buffer overflow in PowerDNS Recursor before 3.1.7.2 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via crafted packets.
PowerDNS before 2.9.21.2 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) via a CH HINFO query.
PowerDNS Authoritative Server before 2.9.21.1 drops malformed queries, which might make it easier for remote attackers to poison DNS caches of other products running on other servers, a different issue than CVE-2008-1447 and CVE-2008-3217.
PowerDNS Recursor before 3.1.6 does not always use the strongest random number generator for source port selection, which makes it easier for remote attack vectors to conduct DNS cache poisoning. NOTE: this is related to incomplete integration of security improvements associated with addressing CVE-2008-1637.
PowerDNS Recursor before 3.1.5 uses insufficient randomness to calculate (1) TRXID values and (2) UDP source port numbers, which makes it easier for remote attackers to poison a DNS cache, related to (a) algorithmic deficiencies in rand and random functions in external libraries, (b) use of a 32-bit seed value, and (c) choice of the time of day as the sole seeding information.
PowerDNS Recursor 3.1.3 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (resource exhaustion and application crash) via a CNAME record with a zero TTL, which triggers an infinite loop.
Buffer overflow in PowerDNS Recursor 3.1.3 and earlier might allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a malformed TCP DNS query that prevents Recursor from properly calculating the TCP DNS query length.
The recursor in PowerDNS before 3.0.1 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via malformed EDNS0 packets.
The DNS implementation of PowerDNS 2.9.16 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via a compressed DNS packet with a label length byte with an incorrect offset, which could trigger an infinite loop.
PowerDNS before 2.9.18, when running with an LDAP backend, does not properly escape LDAP queries, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (failure to answer ldap questions) and possibly conduct an LDAP injection attack.
PowerDNS before 2.9.18, when allowing recursion to a restricted range of IP addresses, does not properly handle questions from clients that are denied recursion, which could cause a "blank out" of answers to those clients that are allowed to use recursion.
The DNSPacket::expand method in dnspacket.cc in PowerDNS before 2.9.17 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service by sending a random stream of bytes.