CVE-2020-25686

A flaw was found in dnsmasq. When receiving a query, dnsmasq does not check for an existing pending request for the same name and forwards a new request. By default, a maximum of 150 pending queries can be sent to upstream servers, so there can be at most 150 queries for the same name. This flaw allows an off-path attacker on the network to substantially reduce the number of attempts that it would have to perform to forge a reply and have it accepted by dnsmasq. This issue is mentioned in the “Birthday Attacks” section of RFC5452. If chained with CVE-2020-25684, the attack complexity of a successful attack is reduced. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data integrity.

Mitigation

The impact of this flaw can be reduced by disabling the dnsmasq cache by adding --cache-size=0 when calling dnsmasq or by adding a line with cache-size=0 to the dnsmasq configuration file (/etc/dnsmasq.conf by default).

When using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 with libvirt through a virt:rhel module, use virsh net-edit <network-name> and reference <https://libvirt.org/formatnetwork.html#elementsNamespaces&gt; to add the suggested option cache-size=0.

There is no way to customize the dnsmasq configuration generated by libvirt, when using versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux prior to version 8.3. If dnsmasq is being run through NetworkManager, create a new file in /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d/ and add cache-size=0 to it.

In all cases, by disabling the cache, you may experience a performance loss in your environment due to all DNS queries being forwarded to the upstream servers. Please evaluate if the mitigation is appropriate for the system’s environment before applying.