CVE-2020-25686

high
Published — · Modified —
CVSS v3
CVSS v2
VIR risk
8.0

Description

A flaw was found in dnsmasq before version 2.83. When receiving a query, dnsmasq does not check for an existing pending request for the same name and forwards a new request. By default, a maximum of 150 pending queries can be sent to upstream servers, so there can be at most 150 queries for the same name. This flaw allows an off-path attacker on the network to substantially reduce the number of attempts that it would have to perform to forge a reply and have it accepted by dnsmasq. This issue is mentioned in the "Birthday Attacks" section of RFC5452. If chained with CVE-2020-25684, the attack complexity of a successful attack is reduced. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data integrity.

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-2020-25686

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: suse — https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2020-25686.html

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: arch — https://security.archlinux.org/ASA-202101-38

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
arch archfixed2.83-1
debian debianbookwormfixed2.83-1
suse slesaffected
debian debianbullseyefixed2.83-1
debian debianforkyfixed2.83-1
debian debiansidfixed2.83-1
debian debiantrixiefixed2.83-1

References

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