Release Notes for BIND Version 9.9.8rc1

Introduction

   This document summarizes changes since the last production release of
   BIND on the corresponding major release branch.

Download

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

Security Fixes

     * An incorrect boundary check in the OPENPGPKEY rdatatype could
       trigger an assertion failure. This flaw is disclosed in
       CVE-2015-5986. [RT #40286]
     * A buffer accounting error could trigger an assertion failure when
       parsing certain malformed DNSSEC keys.
       This flaw was discovered by Hanno Böck of the Fuzzing Project, and
       is disclosed in CVE-2015-5722. [RT #40212]
     * A specially crafted query could trigger an assertion failure in
       message.c.
       This flaw was discovered by Jonathan Foote, and is disclosed in
       CVE-2015-5477. [RT #39795]
     * On servers configured to perform DNSSEC validation, an assertion
       failure could be triggered on answers from a specially configured
       server.
       This flaw was discovered by Breno Silveira Soares, and is disclosed
       in CVE-2015-4620. [RT #39795]

New Features

     * New quotas have been added to limit the queries that are sent by
       recursive resolvers to authoritative servers experiencing
       denial-of-service attacks. When configured, these options can both
       reduce the harm done to authoritative servers and also avoid the
       resource exhaustion that can be experienced by recursives when they
       are being used as a vehicle for such an attack.
       NOTE: These options are not available by default; use configure
       --enable-fetchlimit to include them in the build.
          + fetches-per-server limits the number of simultaneous queries
            that can be sent to any single authoritative server. The
            configured value is a starting point; it is automatically
            adjusted downward if the server is partially or completely
            non-responsive. The algorithm used to adjust the quota can be
            configured via the fetch-quota-params option.
          + fetches-per-zone limits the number of simultaneous queries
            that can be sent for names within a single domain. (Note:
            Unlike "fetches-per-server", this value is not self-tuning.)
       Statistics counters have also been added to track the number of
       queries affected by these quotas.
     * An --enable-querytrace configure switch is now available to enable
       very verbose query tracelogging. This option can only be set at
       compile time. This option has a negative performance impact and
       should be used only for debugging.
     * EDNS COOKIE options content is now displayed as "COOKIE:
       <hexvalue>".

Feature Changes

     * Large inline-signing changes should be less disruptive. Signature
       generation is now done incrementally; the number of signatures to
       be generated in each quantum is controlled by
       "sig-signing-signatures number;". [RT #37927]
     * Retrieving the local port range from net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range
       on Linux is now supported.
     * Active Directory names of the form gc._msdcs.<forest> are now
       accepted as valid hostnames when using the check-names option.
       <forest> is still restricted to letters, digits and hyphens.
     * Names containing rich text are now accepted as valid hostnames in
       PTR records in DNS-SD reverse lookup zones, as specified in RFC
       6763. [RT #37889]

Bug Fixes

     * Asynchronous zone loads were not handled correctly when the zone
       load was already in progress; this could trigger a crash in zt.c.
       [RT #37573]
     * A race during shutdown or reconfiguration could cause an assertion
       failure in mem.c. [RT #38979]
     * Some answer formatting options didn't work correctly with dig
       +short. [RT #39291]
     * Malformed records of some types, including NSAP and UNSPEC, could
       trigger assertion failures when loading text zone files. [RT
       #40274] [RT #40285]
     * Fixed a possible crash in ratelimiter.c caused by NOTIFY messages
       being removed from the wrong rate limiter queue. [RT #40350]
     * The default rrset-order of random was inconsistently applied. [RT
       #40456]
     * BADVERS responses from broken authoritative name servers were not
       handled correctly. [RT #40427]

End of Life

   The BIND 9.9 (Extended Support Version) will be supported until June,
   2017. https://www.isc.org/downloads/software-support-policy/

Thank You

   Thank you to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible.
   If you would like to contribute to ISC to assist us in continuing to
   make quality open source software, please visit our donations page at
   http://www.isc.org/donate/.