Skip to content

CVE-2026-50046

Use After Free: Is CVE-2026-50046 real, exploitable, or a false positive? Here's the community verdict.

signals

public sources

Exploited in wild
Not listed
CISA KEV
Public exploit
None known
Metasploit/EDB/PoC
Base severity
5.9 Medium
CVSS
Exploitation prob.
n/a
FIRST EPSS
Weakness
CWE-416 · Use After Free
CWE

Moderate signals. Triage by your actual exposure and reachability.

baseline read

auto · not a community verdict

Low signal — verdict needed

Few public signals point to active risk. Whether a scanner hit here is a true or false positive depends on your version and config — community verdicts decide.

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

In NLnet Labs Unbound 1.15.0 up to and including 1.25.1, the TLS server name used for DNS-over-TLS (DoT) forwarded queries is tied to a struct's ('serviced_query') lifetime but also referenced by another struct ('waiting_tcp'). When the owning struct is jostled out of the mesh while the DoT TCP stream is still handshaking it frees the storage behind the referenced string and if the TLS stream then errors out, it dereferences the freed pointer. The dereference is read-only and the practical impact is a daemon crash resulting in denial of service. A malicious actor that knows a DoT forwarding/stub Unbound's configuration could exploit the vulnerability by quering records in the appropriate zone while keeping Unbound uder pressure so that the jostle logic kicks in. If answers for the vulnerable zone are slow, the likelihood of jostling such queries is higher, although the timing of the jostle needs to be precise. Requirements for a vulnerable Unbound is the existence of a stub/forward zone configured for DoT together with a configured '#authname' suffix on the server identification. The connectivity to the server needs to exhibit a transient failure at the correct time in order to kick off the vulnerable error path.

Published

Embed this verdict
TruePositive verdict for CVE-2026-50046
Markdown
[![TruePositive verdict](https://www.truepositive.app/cve/CVE-2026-50046/badge.svg)](https://www.truepositive.app/cve/CVE-2026-50046)
HTML
<a href="https://www.truepositive.app/cve/CVE-2026-50046"><img src="https://www.truepositive.app/cve/CVE-2026-50046/badge.svg" alt="TruePositive verdict for CVE-2026-50046"></a>

Live badge that updates automatically as the community verdict changes.

Community ground truth

Be the first practitioner to weigh in

So far this is only TruePositive's editorial baseline from public sources. Add your real-world verdict below — it becomes the signal the next person triaging this relies on.

🥇 The first 50 practitioners to contribute earn a Founding Contributor badge.

In your experience, is this finding real and exploitable?

awaiting field verdicts
Real, but not a risk here
Not a real issue

No account needed. Anonymous verdicts post as an unverified signal. Log in to make yours verified and earn reputation.

Field notes & remediation

Verdicts are the quick signal. Notes are the evidence and fixes behind them.

No notes yet. Be the first to share what you saw, or a fix that worked.

    Add a field note or remediationoptional
    Note type

    What are you adding?

    Markdown supported · minimum 20 characters.

    Same weakness: CWE-416 · Use After Free.