CVE-2026-64194Net::DNS versions through 1.55 for Perl allow Denial of Service via deep DNS compression pointer chains

Official description

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.

Affected packages & fixed versions

Affected products (as reported)

References

• https://www.net-dns.org/blog/#release-candidate-for-netdns-1.56
• https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=179946 issue-tracking
• https://metacpan.org/release/NLNETLABS/Net-DNS-1.55_01/changes release-notes
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/07/20/13
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2026/08/msg00052.html