CVE-2022-3094 An UPDATE message flood may cause named to exhaust all available memory

What is CVE-2022-3094?

CVE-2022-3094 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Isc Bind, published on 25 Jan 2023. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Sending a flood of dynamic DNS updates may cause `named` to allocate large amounts of memory. This, in turn, may cause `named` to exit due to a lack of free memory. We are not aware of any cases where this has been exploited.

Memory is allocated prior to the checking of access permissions (ACLs) and is retained during the processing of a dynamic update from a client whose access credentials are accepted. Memory allocated to clients that are not permitted to send updates is released immediately upon rejection. The scope of this vulnerability is limited therefore to trusted clients who are permitted to make dynamic zone changes.

If a dynamic update is REFUSED, memory will be released again very quickly. Therefore it is only likely to be possible to degrade or stop `named` by sending a flood of unaccepted dynamic updates comparable in magnitude to a query flood intended to achieve the same detrimental outcome.

BIND 9.11 and earlier branches are also affected, but through exhaustion of internal resources rather than memory constraints. This may reduce performance but should not be a significant problem for most servers. Therefore we don't intend to address this for BIND versions prior to BIND 9.16. This issue affects BIND 9 versions 9.16.0 through 9.16.36, 9.18.0 through 9.18.10, 9.19.0 through 9.19.8, and 9.16.8-S1 through 9.16.36-S1.

Weakness: CWE-416, CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-3094?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Isc Bind.

How do I fix CVE-2022-3094?

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-2022-3094 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-3094 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Isc Bind

• CVE-2008-0122 Memory corruption in n/a Critical 10.0
• CVE-2001-0010 Memory corruption in n/a Critical 10.0
• CVE-2001-0011 Memory corruption in n/a Critical 10.0
• CVE-2001-0013 Memory corruption in n/a Critical 10.0
• CVE-2000-1029 Memory corruption in n/a Critical 10.0

All Isc Bind vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as ALPINE-CVE-2022-3094, ALSA-2023:7177, AZL-13204, CLSA-2024-1718289878, CLSA-2024-1718794440, CLSA-2025-1742474086 and 8 more.