CVE-2017-15094 Denial of service in PowerDNS Recursor
Attackers can cause a memory leak and potential denial of service in PowerDNS Recursor by sending crafted DNSSEC ECDSA keys when validation is enabled.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2017-15094?
CVE-2017-15094 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Powerdns Recursor, published on 23 Jan 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
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).
Which versions are affected by CVE-2017-15094?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Powerdns Recursor.
How do I fix CVE-2017-15094?
Upgrade to a fixed version.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2017-15094 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2017-15094 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Powerdns Recursor
- CVE-2009-4009 Memory corruption in n/a
- CVE-2020-10030 Memory corruption in n/a
- CVE-2025-59023 Crafted delegations or IP fragments can poison cached delegations in Recursor
- CVE-2025-59030 Insufficient validation of incoming notifies over TCP can lead to a denial of service in Recursor
- CVE-2023-22617 Denial of service in n/a
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2017-15094, GHSA-q452-p523-w4f9, UBUNTU-CVE-2017-15094.