Release Notes

Introduction

BIND 9.17 is an unstable development release of BIND. This document summarizes new features and functional changes that have been introduced on this branch. With each development release leading up to the stable BIND 9.18 release, this document will be updated with additional features added and bugs fixed. Please see the CHANGES file for a more detailed list of changes and bug fixes.

Supported Platforms

To build on Unix-like systems, BIND requires support for POSIX.1c threads (IEEE Std 1003.1c-1995), the Advanced Sockets API for IPv6 (RFC 3542), and standard atomic operations provided by the C compiler.

The libuv asynchronous I/O library and the OpenSSL cryptography library must be available for the target platform. A PKCS#11 provider can be used instead of OpenSSL for Public Key cryptography (i.e., DNSSEC signing and validation), but OpenSSL is still required for general cryptography operations such as hashing and random number generation.

More information can be found in the PLATFORMS.md file that is included in the source distribution of BIND 9. If your compiler and system libraries provide the above features, BIND 9 should compile and run. If that is not the case, the BIND development team will generally accept patches that add support for systems that are still supported by their respective vendors.

Download

The latest versions of BIND 9 software can always be found at https://www.isc.org/download/. There you will find additional information about each release, source code, and pre-compiled versions for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Notes for BIND 9.17.3

New Features

  • New rndc command rndc dnssec -status shows the current DNSSEC policy and keys in use, the key states, and rollover status. [GL #1612]
  • Added support in the network manager for initiating outgoing TCP connections. [GL #1958]

Feature Changes

  • Disable and disallow static linking of BIND 9 binaries and libraries as BIND 9 modules require dlopen() support and static linking also prevents using security features like read-only relocations (RELRO) or address space layout randomization (ASLR) which are important for programs that interact with the network and process arbitrary user input. [GL #1933]
  • As part of an ongoing effort to use RFC 8499 terminology, primaries can now be used as a synonym for masters in named.conf. Similarly, notify primary-only can now be used as a synonym for notify master-only. The output of rndc zonestatus now uses primary and secondary terminology. [GL #1948]

Bug Fixes

  • A race condition could occur if a TCP socket connection was closed while named was waiting for a recursive response. The attempt to send a response over the closing connection triggered an assertion failure in the function isc__nm_tcpdns_send(). [GL #1937]
  • A race condition could occur when named attempted to use a UDP interface that was shutting down. This triggered an assertion failure in uv__udp_finish_close(). [GL #1938]
  • Fix assertion failure when server was under load and root zone had not yet been loaded. [GL #1862]
  • named could crash when cleaning dead nodes in lib/dns/rbtdb.c that were being reused. [GL #1968]
  • named crashed on shutdown when a new rndc connection was received during shutdown. This has been fixed. [GL #1747]
  • The DS RRset returned by dns_keynode_dsset() was used in a non-thread-safe manner. This could result in an INSIST being triggered. [GL #1926]
  • The primary and secondary keywords, when used as parameters for check-names, were not processed correctly and were being ignored. [GL #1949]
  • rndc dnstap -roll <value> did not limit the number of saved files to <value>. [GL !3728]
  • The validator could fail to accept a properly signed RRset if an unsupported algorithm appeared earlier in the DNSKEY RRset than a supported algorithm. It could also stop if it detected a malformed public key. [GL #1689]
  • The blackhole ACL was inadvertently disabled for client queries. Blocked IP addresses were not used for upstream queries but queries from those addresses could still be answered. [GL #1936]

Notes for BIND 9.17.2

Security Fixes

  • To prevent exhaustion of server resources by a maliciously configured domain, the number of recursive queries that can be triggered by a request before aborting recursion has been further limited. Root and top-level domain servers are no longer exempt from the max-recursion-queries limit. Fetches for missing name server address records are limited to 4 for any domain. This issue was disclosed in CVE-2020-8616. [GL #1388]
  • Replaying a TSIG BADTIME response as a request could trigger an assertion failure. This was disclosed in CVE-2020-8617. [GL #1703]
  • It was possible to trigger an assertion when attempting to fill an oversized TCP buffer. This was disclosed in CVE-2020-8618. [GL #1850]
  • It was possible to trigger an INSIST failure when a zone with an interior wildcard label was queried in a certain pattern. This was disclosed in CVE-2020-8619. [GL #1111] [GL #1718]

Known Issues

  • In this release, the build system has been significantly changed (see below) and there are several unresolved issues to be aware of when using a development release. Please refer to GitLab issue #4 for a list of not-yet-resolved issues that will be fixed in future releases. [GL #4]
  • BIND crashes on startup when linked against libuv 1.36. This issue is related to recvmmsg() support in libuv, which was first included in libuv 1.35. The problem was addressed in libuv 1.37, but the relevant libuv code change requires a special flag to be set during library initialization in order for recvmmsg() support to be enabled. This BIND release sets that special flag when required, so recvmmsg() support is now enabled when BIND is compiled against either libuv 1.35 or libuv 1.37+; libuv 1.36 is still not usable with BIND. [GL #1761] [GL #1797]

New Features

  • The BIND 9 build system has been changed to use a typical autoconf+automake+libtool stack. This should not make any difference for people building BIND 9 from release tarballs, but when building BIND 9 from the Git repository, autoreconf -fi needs to be run first. Extra attention is also needed when using non-standard ./configure options. [GL #4]
  • Documentation was converted from DocBook to reStructuredText. The BIND 9 ARM is now generated using Sphinx and published on Read the Docs. Release notes are no longer available as a separate document accompanying a release. [GL #83]
  • named and named-checkzone now reject master zones that have a DS RRset at the zone apex. Attempts to add DS records at the zone apex via UPDATE will be logged but otherwise ignored. DS records belong in the parent zone, not at the zone apex. [GL #1798]
  • Per-type record count limits can now be specified in update-policy statements, to limit the number of records of a particular type that can be added to a domain name via dynamic update. [GL #1657]
  • dig and other tools can now print the Extended DNS Error (EDE) option when it appears in a request or a response. [GL #1835]
  • dig +qid=<num> allows the user to specify a particular query ID for testing purposes. [GL #1851]
  • A new logging category, rpz-passthru, was added, which allows RPZ passthru actions to be logged into a separate channel. [GL #54]
  • Zone timers are now exported via statistics channel. For primary zones, only the load time is exported. For secondary zones, exported timers also include expire and refresh times. Contributed by Paul Frieden, Verizon Media. [GL #1232]

Feature Changes

  • The default value of max-stale-ttl has changed from 1 week to 12 hours. This option controls how long named retains expired RRsets in cache as a potential mitigation mechanism, should there be a problem with one or more domains. Note that cache content retention is independent of whether stale answers are used in response to client queries (stale-answer-enable yes|no and rndc serve-stale on|off). Serving of stale answers when the authoritative servers are not responding must be explicitly enabled, whereas the retention of expired cache content takes place automatically on all versions of BIND 9 that have this feature available. [GL #1877]

    Warning

    This change may be significant for administrators who expect that stale cache content will be automatically retained for up to 1 week. Add option max-stale-ttl 1w; to named.conf to keep the previous behavior of named.

  • BIND 9 no longer sets receive/send buffer sizes for UDP sockets, relying on system defaults instead. [GL #1713]

  • The default rwlock implementation has been changed back to the native BIND 9 rwlock implementation. [GL #1753]

  • BIND 9 binaries which are neither daemons nor administrative programs were moved to $bindir. Only ddns-confgen, named, rndc, rndc-confgen, and tsig-confgen were left in $sbindir. [GL #1724]

  • listen-on-v6 { any; } creates a separate socket for each interface. Previously, just one socket was created on systems conforming to RFC 3493 and RFC 3542. This change was introduced in BIND 9.16.0, but it was accidentally omitted from documentation. [GL #1782]

  • The native PKCS#11 EdDSA implementation has been updated to PKCS#11 v3.0 and thus made operational again. Contributed by Aaron Thompson. [GL !3326]

  • The OpenSSL ECDSA implementation has been updated to support PKCS#11 via OpenSSL engine (see engine_pkcs11 from libp11 project). [GL #1534]

  • The OpenSSL EdDSA implementation has been updated to support PKCS#11 via OpenSSL engine. Please note that an EdDSA-capable OpenSSL engine is required and thus this code is only a proof-of-concept for the time being. Contributed by Aaron Thompson. [GL #1763]

  • Message IDs in inbound AXFR transfers are now checked for consistency. Log messages are emitted for streams with inconsistent message IDs. [GL #1674]

  • The question section is now checked when processing AXFR, IXFR, and SOA replies while transferring a zone in. [GL #1683]

Bug Fixes

  • When fully updating the NSEC3 chain for a large zone via IXFR, a temporary loss of performance could be experienced on the secondary server when answering queries for nonexistent data that required DNSSEC proof of non-existence (in other words, queries that required the server to find and to return NSEC3 data). The unnecessary processing step that was causing this delay has now been removed. [GL #1834]
  • named could crash with an assertion failure if the name of a database node was looked up while the database was being modified. [GL #1857]
  • When running on a system with support for Linux capabilities, named drops root privileges very soon after system startup. This was causing a spurious log message, unable to set effective uid to 0: Operation not permitted, which has now been silenced. [GL #1042] [GL #1090]
  • A possible deadlock in lib/isc/unix/socket.c was fixed. [GL #1859]
  • Previously, named did not destroy some mutexes and conditional variables in netmgr code, which caused a memory leak on FreeBSD. This has been fixed. [GL #1893]
  • A data race in lib/dns/resolver.c:log_formerr() that could lead to an assertion failure was fixed. [GL #1808]
  • Previously, provide-ixfr no; failed to return up-to-date responses when the serial number was greater than or equal to the current serial number. [GL #1714]
  • A bug in dnstap initialization could prevent some dnstap data from being logged, especially on recursive resolvers. [GL #1795]
  • A bug in dnssec-policy keymgr was fixed, where the check for the existence of a given key’s successor would incorrectly return true if any other key in the keyring had a successor. [GL #1845]
  • With dnssec-policy, when creating a successor key, the “goal” state of the current active key (the predecessor) was not changed and thus never removed from the zone. [GL #1846]
  • When named-checkconf -z was run, it would sometimes incorrectly set its exit code. It reflected the status of the last view found; if zone-loading errors were found in earlier configured views but not in the last one, the exit code indicated success. Thanks to Graham Clinch. [GL #1807]
  • named-checkconf -p could include spurious text in server-addresses statements due to an uninitialized DSCP value. This has been fixed. [GL #1812]
  • When built without LMDB support, named failed to restart after a zone with a double quote (“) in its name was added with rndc addzone. Thanks to Alberto Fernández. [GL #1695]
  • The ARM has been updated to indicate that the TSIG session key is generated when named starts, regardless of whether it is needed. [GL #1842]

Notes for BIND 9.17.1

Security Fixes

  • DNS rebinding protection was ineffective when BIND 9 is configured as a forwarding DNS server. Found and responsibly reported by Tobias Klein. [GL #1574]

Known Issues

  • We have received reports that in some circumstances, receipt of an IXFR can cause the processing of queries to slow significantly. Some of these were related to RPZ processing, which has been fixed in this release (see below). Others appear to occur where there are NSEC3-related changes (such as an operator changing the NSEC3 salt used in the hash calculation). These are being investigated. [GL #1685]

New Features

  • A new option, nsdname-wait-recurse, has been added to the response-policy clause in the configuration file. When set to no, RPZ NSDNAME rules are only applied if the authoritative nameservers for the query name have been looked up and are present in the cache. If this information is not present, the RPZ NSDNAME rules are ignored, but the information is looked up in the background and applied to subsequent queries. The default is yes, meaning that RPZ NSDNAME rules should always be applied, even if the information needs to be looked up first. [GL #1138]

Feature Changes

  • The previous DNSSEC sign statistics used lots of memory. The number of keys to track is reduced to four per zone, which should be enough for 99% of all signed zones. [GL #1179]

Bug Fixes

  • When an RPZ policy zone was updated via zone transfer and a large number of records was deleted, named could become nonresponsive for a short period while deleted names were removed from the RPZ summary database. This database cleanup is now done incrementally over a longer period of time, reducing such delays. [GL #1447]
  • When trying to migrate an already-signed zone from auto-dnssec maintain to one based on dnssec-policy, the existing keys were immediately deleted and replaced with new ones. As the key rollover timing constraints were not being followed, it was possible that some clients would not have been able to validate responses until all old DNSSEC information had timed out from caches. BIND now looks at the time metadata of the existing keys and incorporates it into its DNSSEC policy operation. [GL #1706]

Notes for BIND 9.17.0

Known Issues

  • UDP network ports used for listening can no longer simultaneously be used for sending traffic. An example configuration which triggers this issue would be one which uses the same address:port pair for listen-on(-v6) statements as for notify-source(-v6) or transfer-source(-v6). While this issue affects all operating systems, it only triggers log messages (e.g. “unable to create dispatch for reserved port”) on some of them. There are currently no plans to make such a combination of settings work again.

New Features

  • When a secondary server receives a large incremental zone transfer (IXFR), it can have a negative impact on query performance while the incremental changes are applied to the zone. To address this, named can now limit the size of IXFR responses it sends in response to zone transfer requests. If an IXFR response would be larger than an AXFR of the entire zone, it will send an AXFR response instead.

    This behavior is controlled by the max-ixfr-ratio option - a percentage value representing the ratio of IXFR size to the size of a full zone transfer. The default is 100%. [GL #1515]

  • A new RPZ option nsdname-wait-recurse controls whether RPZ-NSDNAME rules should always be applied even if the names of authoritative name servers for the query name need to be looked up recurively first. The default is yes. Setting it to no speeds up initial responses by skipping RPZ-NSDNAME rules when name server domain names are not yet in the cache. The names will be looked up in the background and the rule will be applied for subsequent queries. [GL #1138]

Feature Changes

  • The system-provided POSIX Threads read-write lock implementation is now used by default instead of the native BIND 9 implementation. Please be aware that glibc versions 2.26 through 2.29 had a bug that could cause BIND 9 to deadlock. A fix was released in glibc 2.30, and most current Linux distributions have patched or updated glibc, with the notable exception of Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) which is a work in progress. If you are running on an affected operating system, compile BIND 9 with --disable-pthread-rwlock until a fixed version of glibc is available. [GL !3125]
  • The rndc nta -dump and rndc secroots commands now both include validate-except entries when listing negative trust anchors. These are indicated by the keyword permanent in place of the expiry date. [GL #1532]

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed re-signing issues with inline zones which resulted in records being re-signed late or not at all.

License

BIND 9 is open source software licensed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0 (see the LICENSE file for the full text).

The license requires that if you make changes to BIND and distribute them outside your organization, those changes must be published under the same license. It does not require that you publish or disclose anything other than the changes you have made to our software. This requirement does not affect anyone who is using BIND, with or without modifications, without redistributing it, nor anyone redistributing BIND without changes.

Those wishing to discuss license compliance may contact ISC at https://www.isc.org/contact/.

End of Life

BIND 9.17 is an unstable development branch. When its development is complete, it will be renamed to BIND 9.18, which will be a stable branch. The end-of-life date for BIND 9.18 has not yet been determined. For those needing long-term stability, the current Extended Support Version (ESV) is BIND 9.11, which will be supported until at least December 2021. See https://kb.isc.org/docs/aa-00896 for details of ISC’s software support policy.

Thank You

Thank you to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible.