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Fencer Intel
medium 6.8

CVE-2016-6172 json

PowerDNS (aka pdns) Authoritative Server before 4.0.1 allows remote primary DNS servers to cause a denial of service (memory exhaustion and…

published 2016-09-26 10 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2016-7106

cvss
6.8
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
3.8%
EPSS 3.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 90%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

PowerDNS (aka pdns) Authoritative Server before 4.0.1 allows remote primary DNS servers to cause a denial of service (memory exhaustion and secondary DNS server crash) via a large (1) AXFR or (2) IXFR response.

Patch / fix

  • pdns Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.0.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2016-6172

  • pdns openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.0.1-1.2
  • pdns-recursor openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.0.3-1.2

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:10136-1openSUSE-SU-2024:10537-1

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-2016-6172 updated cvss 4.9

pdns: Improper restriction of zone size limit

  • 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

3.82% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 90% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 6.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.1 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

References

Sources

Fencer Intel 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.