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Security Tuning¶

Unbound can be tuned to provide stronger (or weaker) security and privacy, depending on the needs of the network and features supported by clients and upstream servers.

enable caps-for-id:: Experimental support for draft dns-0x20. This feature combats potentially spoofed replies by randomly flipping the 0x20 bit of ASCII letters, which switches characters between upper and lower case. The answer is checked to ensure the case in the response matches the request exactly. This is disabled by default since it is experimental, but is safe to enable unless the upstream server does not copy the query question to the response identically. Most if not all servers follow this convention, but it is unknown if this behavior is truly universal.
enable harden dnssec-stripped:: Require DNSSEC for trust-anchored zones. If the DNSSEC data is absent, the zone is marked as bogus. If disabled and no DNSSEC data is received in the response, the zone is marked insecure. Default behavior is enabled. If disabled, there is a risk of a forced downgrade attack on the response that disables security on the zone.
enable harden glue:: Trust glue only if the server is authorized. Default is enabled.
enable hide identity:: When enabled, queries are refused for id.server and hostname.bind, which prevents clients from obtaining the server identity. Default behavior is disabled.
enable hide version:: When enabled, queries are refused for version.server and version.bind, preventing clients from determining the version of Unbound. Default behavior is disabled.
thread unwanted-reply-threshold <threshold>:: When set, Unbound tracks the total number of unwanted replies in each thread. If the threshold is reached, Unbound will take defensive action and logs a warning. This helps prevent cache poisoning by clearing the RRSet and message caches when triggered. By default this behavior is disabled. If this behavior is desired, a starting value of 10000000 (10 million) is best. Change the value in steps of 5-10 million as needed.
jostle timeout <t>:: Timeout in milliseconds, used when the server is very busy. This timeout should be approximately the same as the time it takes for a query to reach an upstream server and receive a response (round trip time). If a large number of queries are received by Unbound, than half the active queries are allowed to complete and the other half are replaced by new queries. This helps reduce the effectiveness of a denial of service attack by allowing the server to ignore slow queries when under load. The default value is 200 msec.