All vulnerabilities

Servers and applications

CVE-2018-5738

Change #4777 (introduced in October 2017) introduced an unforeseen issue in releases which were issued after that date, affecting which clients are permitted to make recursive queries to a BIND nameserver. The intended (and documented) behavior is that if an operator has not specified a value for the "allow-recursion" setting, it SHOULD default to one of the following: none, if "recursion no;"…

Severity
High 7.5
Published
16 Jan 2019
Last changed
17 Jun 2026
Added to UpHeron
1 Nov 2026
Exploit chance
11% in the next 30 daysHigher than 96% of CVEs. EPSS by FIRST, 10 Nov 2026
Weakness
Information exposure (CWE-200)
Attack
Over the network · No login needed · No user action needed
Attacker can
Read data
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
Sources
NVD

Description

Change #4777 (introduced in October 2017) introduced an unforeseen issue in releases which were issued after that date, affecting which clients are permitted to make recursive queries to a BIND nameserver. The intended (and documented) behavior is that if an operator has not specified a value for the "allow-recursion" setting, it SHOULD default to one of the following: none, if "recursion no;" is set in named.conf; a value inherited from the "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" settings IF "recursion yes;" (the default for that setting) AND match lists are explicitly set for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query" (see the BIND9 Administrative Reference Manual section 6.2 for more details); or the intended default of "allow-recursion {localhost; localnets;};" if "recursion yes;" is in effect and no values are explicitly set for "allow-query-cache" or "allow-query".

From NVD. Shortened; the full text is there.

Affected software

SoftwareAffected versions
BIND 9Servers and applications · cpe:a:isc:bind
  • Version 9.13.0
  • Version 9.12.1-p2
  • Version 9.12.1-p1
  • Version 9.12.1
All 17 release lines
  • Version 9.9.12
  • Version 9.9.12-s1
  • Version 9.10.7
  • Version 9.10.7-s1
  • Version 9.11.3
  • Version 9.11.3-s1
  • Version 9.11.3-s2
  • Version 9.12.0-a1
  • Version 9.12.0-b1
  • Version 9.12.0-b2
  • Version 9.12.0-rc1
  • Version 9.12.0-rc3
  • Version 9.12.0
  • Version 9.12.1
  • Version 9.12.1-p1
  • Version 9.12.1-p2
  • Version 9.13.0

References

  • NVD https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-5738
  • CVE.org https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2018-5738