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Fencer Intel
medium 5.9

CVE-2018-5737 json

BIND 9.12's serve-stale implementation can cause an assertion failure in rbtdb.c or other undesirable behavior, even if serve-stale is not enabled.

published 2019-01-16 7 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2018-17506

cvss
5.9
version 3.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
10.6%
EPSS 10.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 95%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A problem with the implementation of the new serve-stale feature in BIND 9.12 can lead to an assertion failure in rbtdb.c, even when stale-answer-enable is off. Additionally, problematic interaction between the serve-stale feature and NSEC aggressive negative caching can in some cases cause undesirable behavior from named, such as a recursion loop or excessive logging. Deliberate exploitation of this condition could cause operational problems depending on the particular manifestation -- either degradation or denial of service. Affects BIND 9.12.0 and 9.12.1.

Patch / fix

  • bind openSUSE Tumbleweed 9.16.20-1.4

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:10650-1

  • bind Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +14 more 9.12.1_p2-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2018-5737

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

  • bind Arch Linux 9.12.1.P2-1

arch linux advisories AVG-706

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-2018-5737 updated cvss 5.9

bind: Interaction between NSEC aggresive negative caching and the serve-stale feature can cause a denial of service

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 bind, bind97 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 bind, bind-sdb, bind-libs, bind-utils, bind-chroot Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 bind, bind-sdb, bind-libs, bind-utils, bind-chroot, bind-pkcs11, +6 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 bind, bind-sdb, bind-libs, bind-utils, bind-chroot, bind-pkcs11, +7 more
    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

10.63% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 95% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.0 5.9 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/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

  • ISC BIND 9

Classification

Weakness

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.