named configured to answer from stale cache may terminate unexpectedly at recursive-clients soft quota

Summary

This issue can affect BIND 9 resolvers with stale-answer-enable yes; that also make use of the option stale-answer-client-timeout, configured with a value greater than zero.

If the resolver receives many queries that require recursion, there will be a corresponding increase in the number of clients that are waiting for recursion to complete. If there are sufficient clients already waiting when a new client query is received so that it is necessary to SERVFAIL the longest waiting client (see BIND 9 ARM recursive-clients limit and soft quota), then it is possible for a race to occur between providing a stale answer to this older client and sending an early timeout SERVFAIL, which may cause an assertion failure. This issue affects BIND 9 versions 9.16.12 through 9.16.36, 9.18.0 through 9.18.10, 9.19.0 through 9.19.8, and 9.16.12-S1 through 9.16.36-S1.

References