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strenholme • yesterday at 11:43 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

It has hit the point where I’ve told people reporting bugs with my software that I won’t acknowledge the bug unless they provide a patch to mitigate the issue.

A lot of these bug reports are incorrectly filed. Let’s look at one issue, which I am sure was found with AI assistance:

CVE-2026-40719

Here’s the issue: An IP authorized to perform recursive queries can cause the DNS server to be non-responsive if it sends hundreds of specially crafted packets a minute (this can be changed to millions of packets a minute if one sets a parameter in the configuration file). Normal service is restored within a minute of the attack being stopped. The workaround would require me to essentially rewrite the recursive part of the DNS server.

Since the DNS server, like any server in a LAN, is already vulnerable to a flooding attack, this is just a flooding attack with extra steps.

I told the guy that was interesting, I’m not being paid enough to rewrite the DNS server to be immune to the attack, and people shouldn’t be using its recursion (it has very limited IPv6 support, for starters), and if they do use its recursion, only authorized IPs (e.g. 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.0/24) should be allowed to perform recursion.

It wasn’t a serious enough attack to merit a patch, and anyway the guy reporting the bug didn’t even have the decent courtesy to give me a patch.

The guy responded by filing for a CVE report, incorrectly calling it a “high impact” bug, and I had to make a “patch” which simply disables recursion: https://samboy.github.io/MaraDNS/patches/MaraDNS-CVE-2026-40...

Point being, a lot of these CVE reports out there which supposedly are high impact bugs are trivial things like “someone can overload a server for about one minute if they send hundreds to thousands of specially crafted DOS packets”.

(Today, I got an issue which, as far as I can tell, looks to be a Linux kernel issue and not an issue with my code. I told him to show me how he would patch my code to “fix” the issue, but so far have gotten nothing but crickets)


Replies

cowlevel • today at 12:35 AM

Who forced you to make the patch instead of just leaving the CVE open forever?

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