CVE-2022-38177 Memory leak in ECDSA DNSSEC verification code

What is CVE-2022-38177?

CVE-2022-38177 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 21 Sep 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

By spoofing the target resolver with responses that have a malformed ECDSA signature, an attacker can trigger a small memory leak. It is possible to gradually erode available memory to the point where named crashes for lack of resources.

Weakness: CWE-401

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-38177?

It affects 4 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Fedoraproject Fedora, Isc Bind, Netapp Active Iq Unified Manager.

How do I fix CVE-2022-38177?

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-2022-38177 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-38177 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as ALPINE-CVE-2022-38177, AZL-11001, AZL-39986, DEBIAN-CVE-2022-38177, GHSA-5vfq-rv44-c5ff, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-38177.