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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2020-12244 json

An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor 4.1.0 through 4.3.0 where records in the answer section of a NXDOMAIN response lacking an SOA…

published 2020-05-19 6 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2020-4559

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.4%
EPSS 2.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 84%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue has been found in PowerDNS Recursor 4.1.0 through 4.3.0 where records in the answer section of a NXDOMAIN response lacking an SOA were not properly validated in SyncRes::processAnswer, allowing an attacker to bypass DNSSEC validation.

Patch / fix

  • pdns-recursor Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.3.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2020-12244

  • pdns-recursor openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.5.5-1.3
  • pdns-recursor Package Hub 15 SP1, Package Hub 12 SP1, openSUSE Leap 15.1 4.1.12-bp151.4.3.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11157-1openSUSE-SU-2020:0698-1

  • pdns-recursor Alpine 3.10, Alpine 3.9 4.1.16-r0
  • pdns-recursor Alpine 3.11 4.2.2-r0
  • pdns-recursor Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +10 more 4.3.1-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2020-12244

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • powerdns-recursor Arch Linux 4.2.2-1

arch linux advisories AVG-1163

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-2020-12244 updated cvss 7.5

pdns-recursor: incorrect handling of records in the answer section of a NXDOMAIN response lacking an SOA allows an attacker to bypass DNSSEC validation

  • 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

2.43% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 84% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-347 Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature

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.