CVE-2020-10995

medium
Published — · Modified —
CVSS v3
CVSS v2
VIR risk
5.5

Description

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.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: debian — https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2020-10995

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: arch — https://security.archlinux.org/ASA-202005-10

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
arch archfixed4.2.2-1
debian debianbookwormfixed4.3.1-1
debian debianbullseyefixed4.3.1-1
debian debianforkyfixed4.3.1-1
debian debiansidfixed4.3.1-1
debian debiantrixiefixed4.3.1-1

References

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.