High (7.5). EPSS 0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.
c-ares is an asynchronous resolver library. Prior to 1.34.7, ares_dns_name_parse() enforces backward DNS compression pointers but does not bound the total pointer hops or assembled name length. A malicious DNS server can send a response containing a long descending pointer chain and many resource records whose NAME or RDATA fields refer to the chain, causing repeated decompression work that grows quadratically with message size. A single crafted response can stall the single-threaded c-ares event loop and deny DNS resolution, without causing memory corruption or information disclosure. This issue is fixed in version 1.34.7.
Severity
CVSS 3.1
7.5 high
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days; higher than 41% of CVEs (scores of 2026-10-31)