CVE-2020-8616

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

Description

A malicious actor who intentionally exploits this lack of effective limitation on the number of fetches performed when processing referrals can, through the use of specially crafted referrals, cause a recursing server to issue a very large number of fetches in an attempt to process the referral. This has at least two potential effects: The performance of the recursing server can potentially be degraded by the additional work required to perform these fetches, and The attacker can exploit this behavior to use the recursing server as a reflector in a reflection attack with a high amplification factor.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: suse — https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2020-8616.html

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: debian — https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2020-8616

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: arch — https://security.archlinux.org/ASA-202005-13

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
debian debianbookwormfixed1:9.16.3-1
debian debianbullseyefixed1:9.16.3-1
debian debianforkyfixed1:9.16.3-1
debian debiansidfixed1:9.16.3-1
debian debiantrixiefixed1:9.16.3-1
arch archfixed9.16.3-1
suse slesaffected

References

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