When incoming DNS over HTTPS support is enabled using the nghttp2 provider, and queries are routed to a tcp-only or DNS over TLS backend, an attacker can trigger an assertion failure in DNSdist by sending a request for a zone transfer (AXFR or IXFR) over DNS over HTTPS, causing the process to stop and thus leading to a Denial of Service. DNS over HTTPS is not enabled by default, and backends are using plain DNS (Do53) by default.

An issue has been found in PowerDNS DNSDist before 1.3.3 allowing a remote attacker to craft a DNS query with trailing data such that the addition of a record by dnsdist, for example an OPT record when adding EDNS Client Subnet, might result in the trailing data being smuggled to the backend as a valid record while not seen by dnsdist. This is an issue when dnsdist is deployed as a DNS Firewall and used to filter some records that should not be received by the backend. This issue occurs only when either the 'useClientSubnet' or the experimental 'addXPF' parameters are used when declaring a new backend.

An issue has been found in dnsdist before 1.2.0 in the way EDNS0 OPT records are handled when parsing responses from a backend. When dnsdist is configured to add EDNS Client Subnet to a query, the response may contain an EDNS0 OPT record that has to be removed before forwarding the response to the initial client. On a 32-bit system, the pointer arithmetic used when parsing the received response to remove that record might trigger an undefined behavior leading to a crash.

dnsdist version 1.1.0 is vulnerable to a flaw in authentication mechanism for REST API potentially allowing CSRF attack.