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Not in CISA KEV
HIGH severity

CVE-2018-20994 — trust-dns-proto

HIGH

CVE-2018-20994 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-674 vulnerability in trust-dns-proto. A fix is available for trust-dns-proto — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Uncontrolled recursion in trust-dns-proto

Also known asRUSTSEC-2018-0007
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Oct 8, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
1.4%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs72th percentile — riskier than 72% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.64%1.27%1.91%0.3%1.4%Apr 26Aug 26Oct 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

CVE-2018-20994 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.

Where this sits among everything scored

Of 385,386 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.

Real-World Exposure

1 pkg affected
🦀trust-dns-proto

Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.

Description

There's a stack overflow leading to a crash when Trust-DNS's parses a malicious DNS packet. Affected versions of this crate did not properly handle parsing of DNS message compression (RFC1035 section 4.1.4). The parser could be tricked into infinite loop when a compression offset pointed back to the same domain name to be parsed. This allows an attacker to craft a malicious DNS packet which when consumed with Trust-DNS could cause stack overflow and crash the affected software.

Affected Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
🦀crates.iotrust-dns-protoall versions0.4.3cargo update -p trust-dns-proto --precise 0.4.3

Affected Products

1 product · 3 configurations
Application
trust-dns-prototrust-dns-proto_project
< 0.4.3
1 version
0.5.0

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency

  1. Detect

    Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for trust-dns-proto, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update trust-dns-proto to 0.4.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2018-20994 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. Workarounds

    Stop feeding it untrusted input: reject or quarantine files and payloads from unverified sources until you can upgrade, restrict accepted formats to the ones you actually need, and run the parsing or decoding step in a least-privileged sandbox or short-lived worker so a crash or corrupted read cannot reach the rest of the process.

Frequently Asked Questions

There's a stack overflow leading to a crash when Trust-DNS's parses a malicious DNS packet. Affected versions of this crate did not properly handle parsing of DNS message compression (RFC1035 section 4.1.4). The parser could be tricked into infinite loop when a compression offset pointed back to the same domain name to be parsed. This allows an attacker to craft a malicious DNS packet which when consumed with Trust-DNS could cause stack overflow and crash the affected software.
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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CVE-2018-20994: trust-dns-proto — Fixed in 0.4.3