NRDAX-T0382 - Error-Response Connection-State Leak

memory_amp · active · first seen 2026-07-13

provenance: Reproduced in NullRabbit's attack-reproduction pipeline

mechanism

dnsdist's DoQ/DoH3 receiver allocates per-error bookkeeping state whenever it emits a self-generated FORMERR/REFUSED/SERVFAIL/NOTIMP response, and attaches that state to the QUIC connection object rather than the completed stream/query, freeing it only on full connection teardown. An attacker opens a single DoQ/DoH3 connection and streams a large run of complete, well-formed queries engineered to each trigger a local error response, causing the per-error allocations to accumulate unboundedly for as long as the connection (or its parallel siblings) stays open. The fix-class is scoping/freeing per-error bookkeeping to the query/stream lifetime instead of the connection lifetime, bounding memory growth regardless of connection duration.

instances (1)

chain	primitive	fidelity	origin	reproducer (bundle)	source
quic	dnsdist_doq_error_query_mem_leak	lab	reverse-engineered-cve	dnsdist_doq_error_query_mem_leak	-

related (memory_amp)

NRDAX-T0023 - Coalesced Packet Buffer Leak active NRDAX-T0025 - Compact Block Size Integer Overflow active NRDAX-T0038 - Count Underflow Header Serving Amplification active NRDAX-T0042 - Crypto Frame Reassembly Buffer Exhaustion active NRDAX-T0046 - Decompression Bomb Resource Exhaustion active NRDAX-T0059 - Duplicate Transport Parameter Memory Leak active NRDAX-T0061 - Duplicate Tx Mempool Index Desync active NRDAX-T0071 - Ethash Verification Memory Exhaustion active

cite

https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0382

plain

NRDAX Registry. Technique NRDAX-T0382.

bibtex

@misc{nrdax_NRDAX_T0382,
  title = {Error-Response Connection-State Leak (NRDAX-T0382)},
  howpublished = {NRDAX Registry},
  url = {https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0382},
}

json (csl)

{
  "id": "nrdax-NRDAX-T0382",
  "type": "dataset",
  "title": "Error-Response Connection-State Leak (NRDAX-T0382)",
  "URL": "https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0382",
  "publisher": "NRDAX Registry"
}