Security Advisories (5)
CVE-2007-6341 (2008-02-08)

Allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (program "croak") via a crafted DNS response.

CVE-2007-3409 (2007-06-26)

Net::DNS before 0.60, a Perl module, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (stack consumption) via a malformed compressed DNS packet with self-referencing pointers, which triggers an infinite loop.

CVE-2007-3377 (2007-06-25)

Header.pm in Net::DNS before 0.60, a Perl module, (1) generates predictable sequence IDs with a fixed increment and (2) can use the same starting ID for all child processes of a forking server, which allows remote attackers to spoof DNS responses, as originally reported for qpsmtp and spamassassin.

CVE-2026-64193 (2026-07-20)

Net::DNS versions through 1.55 for Perl allow remote execution injection via EDNS EXTENDED ERROR. Net::DNS::RR::OPT::EXTENDED_ERROR::_decompose parses the EXTRA-TEXT field of an EDNS EXTENDED-ERROR option (RFC 8914) by tokenising the raw bytes and passing the result to Perl's eval. There is some escaping done for $ and @, but not for backticks. This can be exploited for command execution if $pkt->edns->option('EXTENDED-ERROR') is called in array context, for example with a payload of {0:`"<command>"`} in EXTRA-TEXT.

CVE-2026-64194 (2026-07-20)

Net::DNS versions through 1.55 for Perl allow Denial of Service via deep DNS compression pointer chains. Net::DNS::DomainName::decode follows RFC 1035 compression pointers by recursing into itself with no depth limit. It is possible to construct a name which saturates the call stack (at least with larger TCP responses), leading to a potential Denial of Service. The guard `$link < $offset` prevents forward and circular chains, but still allows arbitrarily long backward chains. The per-offset cache (`$cache`) is populated at the start of each call and short-circuits only re-traverses of the same offset - the initial descent through a fresh chain still recurses at full depth. A crafted packet can chain two-byte compression pointers so that each one points two bytes earlier than the previous, producing a chain length of `offset / 2`. For the 14-bit pointer field (max offset 16383) this gives up to ~8191 recursive frames. For a TCP DNS message the limit is the 16-bit length field (~32767 frames). Perl's default C stack handles only a few thousand frames; beyond that the process receives SIGSEGV or similar, which is a denial-of-service for any application parsing untrusted DNS data. The vulnerability is triggered by `Net::DNS::Packet->new(\$wire)` i.e. any point where the library decodes a DNS message from the network.

NAME

Net::DNS::Nameserver - DNS server class

SYNOPSIS

use Net::DNS::Nameserver;

DESCRIPTION

Instances of the Net::DNS::Nameserver class represent simple DNS server objects. See "EXAMPLE" for an example.

METHODS

new

 my $ns = Net::DNS::Nameserver->new(
	LocalAddr	 => "10.1.2.3",
	LocalPort	 => "5353",
	ReplyHandler => \&reply_handler,
	Verbose		 => 1
 );

Creates a nameserver object. Attributes are:

LocalAddr		IP address on which to listen.	Defaults to INADDR_ANY.
LocalPort		Port on which to listen.  Defaults to 53.
ReplyHandler	Reference to reply-handling subroutine.	 Required.
Verbose		Print info about received queries.	Defaults to 0 (off).

The ReplyHandler subroutine is passed the query name, query class, query type and optionally an argument containing header bit settings (see below). It must return the response code and references to the answer, authority, and additional sections of the response. Common response codes are:

NOERROR	No error
FORMERR	Format error
SERVFAIL	Server failure
NXDOMAIN	Non-existent domain (name doesn't exist)
NOTIMP	Not implemented
REFUSED	Query refused

For advanced usage there is an optional argument containing an hashref with the settings for the aa, ra, and ad header bits. The argument is of the form { ad => 1, aa => 0, ra => 1 }.

See RFC 1035 and the IANA dns-parameters file for more information:

ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1035.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/dns-parameters

The nameserver will listen for both UDP and TCP connections. On Unix-like systems, the program will probably have to run as root to listen on the default port, 53. A non-privileged user should be able to listen on ports 1024 and higher.

Returns a Net::DNS::Nameserver object, or undef if the object couldn't be created.

See "EXAMPLE" for an example.

main_loop

$ns->main_loop;

Start accepting queries.

EXAMPLE

The following example will listen on port 5353 and respond to all queries for A records with the IP address 10.1.2.3. All other queries will be answered with NXDOMAIN. Authority and additional sections are left empty. The $peerhost variable catches the IP address of the peer host, so that additional filtering on its basis may be applied.

 #!/usr/bin/perl 
 
 use Net::DNS;
 use strict;
 use warnings;
 
 sub reply_handler {
	 my ($qname, $qclass, $qtype, $peerhost) = @_;
	 my ($rcode, @ans, @auth, @add);
	 
	 if ($qtype eq "A") {
		 my ($ttl, $rdata) = (3600, "10.1.2.3");
		 push @ans, Net::DNS::RR->new("$qname $ttl $qclass $qtype $rdata");
		 $rcode = "NOERROR";
	 } else {
         $rcode = "NXDOMAIN";
	 }
	 
	 # mark the answer as authoritive (by setting the 'aa' flag
	 return ($rcode, \@ans, \@auth, \@add, { aa => 1 });
 }
 
 my $ns = Net::DNS::Nameserver->new(
     LocalPort    => 5353,
     ReplyHandler => \&reply_handler,
     Verbose      => 1,
 );
 
 if ($ns) {
     $ns->main_loop;
 } else {
    die "couldn't create nameserver object\n";
 }

BUGS

Net::DNS::Nameserver objects can handle only one query at a time.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1997-2002 Michael Fuhr.

Portions Copyright (c) 2002-2003 Chris Reinhardt.

All rights reserved. This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO

perl(1), Net::DNS, Net::DNS::Resolver, Net::DNS::Packet, Net::DNS::Update, Net::DNS::Header, Net::DNS::Question, Net::DNS::RR, RFC 1035