By design, BIND is intended to limit the number of TCP clients that can be connected at any given time. The number of allowed connections is a tunable parameter which, if unset, defaults to a conservative value for most servers. Unfortunately, the code which was intended to limit the number of simultaneous connections contained an error which could be exploited to grow the number of simultaneous connections beyond this limit. Versions affected: BIND 9.9.0 -> 9.10.8-P1, 9.11.0 -> 9.11.6, 9.12.0 -> 9.12.4, 9.14.0. BIND 9 Supported Preview Edition versions 9.9.3-S1 -> 9.11.5-S3, and 9.11.5-S5. Versions 9.13.0 -> 9.13.7 of the 9.13 development branch are also affected. Versions prior to BIND 9.9.0 have not been evaluated for vulnerability to CVE-2018-5743.

A programming error in the nxdomain-redirect feature can cause an assertion failure in query.c if the alternate namespace used by nxdomain-redirect is a descendant of a zone that is served locally. The most likely scenario where this might occur is if the server, in addition to performing NXDOMAIN redirection for recursive clients, is also serving a local copy of the root zone or using mirroring to provide the root zone, although other configurations are also possible. Versions affected: BIND 9.12.0-> 9.12.4, 9.14.0. Also affects all releases in the 9.13 development branch.