[Dnsmasq-discuss] Security - IMPORTANT

Simon Kelley simon at thekelleys.org.uk Mon May 11 17:18:25 UTC 2026 Previous message (by thread): [Dnsmasq-discuss] Issue with circuit-id matching on dhcp requests

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Today, 11th May 2026 CERT is releasing a set of six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq. These are all long-standing bugs which apply to pretty much all non-ancient versions. The CVE has been pre-disclosed to vendors, so hopefully they will be releasing patched versions of their dnsmasq packages in a timely manner.

Details and patches are available on the website at

https://thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/CVE/

and I have made "2.92rel2" release of the current 2.92 dnsmasq stable release which is downloadable from the usual place and has had these patches applied.

At the same time, the commits which fix these bugs in the development tree will be uploaded. Some of these use the same patches as the backports, but some are more comprehensive re-writes to tackle root-causes.

There has been something of a revolution in AI-based security research, and I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of months dealing with bug reports, weeding duplicates (so many duplicates!) and triaging bugs into those which need vendor pre-disclosure and those which it's better to make public and fix immediately. Those judgements have been necessarily subjective, but given the number of times "good guys" have found these bugs, there's no doubt that "bad guys" have been able to do the same, so long embargoes seem kind of pointless.

There's also the problem that the amount of time and effort, for all actors, needed to co-ordinate an embargo and provide backports is huge. I think the priority for most bugs is to fix them going forward, and have new dnsmasq releases as bug-free as possible. To this end, you may have noticed that there have been a lot of security-fix commits to the git repo in the weeks prior to this announcement.

I will shortly tag dnsmasq-2.93rc1 and the aim is to get a stable 2.93 release done ASAP. Testing of release candidate by members here is important and I'd like to encourage anyone who can to do that as soon as they can. With luck, 2.93 could be out in a week or so.

The tsunami of AI-generated bug reports shows no signs of stopping, so it is likely that this process will have to be repeated again soon. There's a tension between getting as much as possible of the ongoing bug stream fixed in 2.93 and it's timely release. I plan to prioritise timeliness, and keep working after that as necessary.

Simon.

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