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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2017-15120 in the critical feed json

An issue has been found in the parsing of authoritative answers in PowerDNS Recursor before 4.0.8, leading to a NULL pointer dereference wh…

published 2018-07-27 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2017-6581

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
51.4%
EPSS 51.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 98%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue has been found in the parsing of authoritative answers in PowerDNS Recursor before 4.0.8, leading to a NULL pointer dereference when parsing a specially crafted answer containing a CNAME of a different class than IN. An unauthenticated remote attacker could cause a denial of service.

Patch / fix

  • powerdns recursor 4.0.8
  • pdns-recursor Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.1.0-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2017-15120

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2017-15120 updated cvss 7.5

pdns-recursor: Crafted CNAME answer can cause a denial of service

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

51.35% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 98% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Affected products

  • PowerDNS pdns-recursor

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.