Vulnerabilities 4.0

If you think you have found a security bug in OpenSSL, please report it to us.

Show issues fixed only in OpenSSL 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.2, 3.1, 3.0, 1.1.1, 1.1.0, 1.0.2, 1.0.1, 1.0.0, 0.9.8, 0.9.7, 0.9.6, or all versions.

CVE-2026-35189

Issue summary: A certificate with many nameRelativeToCRLIssuer CRL distribution points causes disproportionate heap growth when OpenSSL caches X.509 extensions.

Impact summary: Receiving a crafted certificate from a malicious peer can lead to significant memory pressure and possible Denial of Service in clients or in servers that solicit client certificates.

CWE: CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Description: A certificate or a set of certificates that fits under the limit for size of certificates accepted from the peer (~100 KiB) can result in allocation of several hundred MiB of resident memory on the receiving side during a normal TLS handshake. This may be enough to crash the client or server, if multiple concurrent connections lead to similarly large memory allocations.

The fix postpones processing of the CRL distribution points extensions in certificates to the time when the processed value is required for CRL processing. This avoids keeping large memory allocations for a long time when such certificates are received.

FIPS impact: no The affected code is outside the FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-35191

Issue summary: The OpenSSL QUIC server, when configured to not preform address validation, can be forced to count incoming packets multiple times in its unvalidated credit computation, leading to a violation of the RFC 9000 unvalidated connection amplification limit of 3 times the amount of data received.

Impact summary: A remote attacker able to spoof packets to a server using the OpenSSL QUIC implementation might use the server for an amplification of a DDoS attack.

CWE: CWE-440: Expected Behavior Violation

Description: OpenSSL’s QUIC stack, when operating as a server, enforces client address validation (RFC 9000, Section 8), to confirm the peer address is not used for a traffic amplification attack. If this feature is disabled on the server, the QUIC stack limits the amount of server data that can be sent to 3 times the amount of data received from the peer address, until such time as the TLS handshake is completed.

The OpenSSL QUIC server, when operating in non-validation mode, adds the length of the whole datagram received to the unvalidated credit limit when processing each QUIC packet in the datagram. A remote peer may, after establishing a connection with an initial client hello frame, send a subsequent datagram containing multiple QUIC packets, leading the server to account the entire datagram length for each packet in the datagram, resulting in the server believing that the peer has sent more data than it actually has, thereby violating the 3x amplification limit mandated by the RFC.

FIPS impact: no As the QUIC stack lives outside the FIPS module boundary, no FIPS modules are affected by this CVE.

CVE-2026-42772

Issue summary: The QUIC stream reassembly algorithm performance deteriorates progressively as packets are arriving out of order. The worst case has a quadratic complexity proportional to the number of stream frames kept in the buffer for the received stream data.

Impact summary: A remote QUIC peer that completes the handshake can create a connection-scoped CPU pressure and potentially a Denial of Service using compliant STREAM frames inside the advertised receive window, with low attacker bandwidth.

CWE: CWE-407: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

Description: OpenSSL manages received QUIC stream fragments using a doubly-linked list. While it optimizes for append operations (at the end of the list), it falls back to a head-to-tail linear search for any fragment that does not immediately follow the current tail.

By manipulating the sequence of offsets, an attacker can force the server to perform O(n^2) operations, consuming excessive CPU time for the QUIC process.

FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as the QUIC implementation is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-54872

Issue summary: The generic elliptic-curve scalar multiplication used for ECDSA and SM2 signature operations with curves that do not have a dedicated implementation leaks information about the secret nonce through timing.

Impact summary: An attacker able to measure signing times may learn information about the per-signature secret nonce, which over many signatures can, via a lattice / Hidden Number Problem attack, lead to recovery of the private key.

CWE: CWE-208: Observable Timing Discrepancy

Description: The generic elliptic-curve scalar multiplication used for curves that do not have a dedicated constant-time implementation pads the secret scalar with non-constant-time BIGNUM operations, so the time taken depends on the value of the secret scalar derived from the ECDSA and SM2 nonce.

The leak is very small; observing it requires a large number of measurements. The effect is largest for curves whose group order lies on a machine-word boundary, such as brainpoolP384r1.

Applications using ECDSA signing over the Brainpool and other generic prime curves, and SM2 signing on platforms that use the generic implementation, are vulnerable to this issue.

The NIST curves P-256, P-384 and P-521 use dedicated constant-time implementations and are not affected.

FIPS Impact: no The FIPS modules are not affected: the approved NIST curves used in the FIPS provider have dedicated constant-time implementations and do not use the affected code path.

CVE-2026-54873

Issue summary: QUIC process may keep memory for QUIC packet buffer for much longer period than necessary.

Impact summary: Remote peer can exploit this vulnerability by sending maliciously crafted packets, making the local QUIC stack to keep the memory for packet buffers allocated. The time for which the memory remains allocated is entirely under the control of the potentially malicious remote peer.

CWE: CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Description: To save copy operation from the packet buffer to the stream reassemble buffer the QUIC stack leaves the stream data on the packet buffer waiting to be copied to a buffer provided by the local receiving application. The QUIC stack releases a reference to the packet buffer only after the data are copied to the application buffer. This design is more efficient for legitimate data transfers but enables an attacker to allocate a lot more memory than actually required by the data kept in the receiving stream buffer.

To mitigate the vulnerability, the QUIC stack now calculates and monitors memory overhead for every stream. The memory overhead for a single stream frame is calculated as a difference between the size of the whole packet that carries the stream frame and the size of the stream frame itself. The memory overhead for a single stream frame is added to the total (cumulative) memory overhead QUIC stack keeps for each stream. Once the cumulative memory overhead exceeds 64kB, the QUIC stack moves the stream frame data from the packet buffer to the stream buffer, starting with the next packet received.

FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as the QUIC implementation is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-54875

Issue summary: A non-constant-time optimized implementation of scalar point multiplication is used for SM2 private key operations on ARM64 and RISC-V platforms.

Impact summary: An attacker able to measure the time taken by, or to observe the cache-line access pattern of SM2 signing or decryption on an affected platform can learn information about the secret scalar.

CWE: CWE-208: Observable Timing Discrepancy

Description: On ARM64 and RISC-V processors, the SM2 curve uses an optimized scalar multiplication implementation whose conditional branches and table look ups are chosen according to the bits of the secret scalar. The execution time and the cache-access pattern therefore depend on the long-term private key (during SM2 decryption) or the per-signature nonce (during SM2 signature generation), forming a timing and cache side-channel.

FIPS Impact: no SM2 is not a FIPS algorithm and the optimized SM2 implementation is not part of the FIPS module.

OpenSSL 4.0, 3.6, 3.5 and 3.4 are vulnerable to this issue on AArch64 and RISC-V.

OpenSSL 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are not affected by this issue.

OpenSSL 4.0 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 4.0.3. OpenSSL 3.6 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.6.5. OpenSSL 3.5 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.5.9. OpenSSL 3.4 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.4.8.

This issue was reported on 2 May 2026 by Abhinav Agarwal. It was independently reported on 6 June 2026 by Feng Xue. The fix was developed by Igor Ustinov.

– cut (non-publishing metadata for internal use) – Reported by: Abhinav Agarwal, Feng Xue Fixed by: Igor Ustinov

CVE-2026-72897

Issue summary: A TLS server that calls SSL_set_SSL_CTX() to switch a connection to a different SSL_CTX part way through a handshake may access memory beyond the end of an internal array if the replacement context knows about more provider signature algorithms than the context the connection was created from. Applications which never call SSL_set_SSL_CTX() are not affected.

Impact summary: A remote peer may be able to cause a small out-of-bounds read, and in some circumstances a fixed-value out-of-bounds write, on the server heap. This may lead to a Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-787: Out-of-bounds Write

Description: A TLS connection records how many certificate slots it has when it is created, taken from the SSL_CTX that created it: the built-in certificate types plus one slot for each provider TLS-SIGALG entry that context was aware of. That count sizes an internal array of per-slot certificate validity flags.

An application may replace a connection’s SSL_CTX part way through the handshake by calling SSL_set_SSL_CTX(), most commonly from a servername callback in order to serve a different virtual host. Doing so did not refresh the recorded count. A provider signature algorithm’s slot index is its position in the list of whichever context resolves it, so if the replacement context is aware of more of them than the original, an algorithm offered by the peer can resolve to an index beyond the end of the array. Processing the peer’s signature algorithms then reads one four byte word past the end for each such algorithm and, where the word read is zero, writes a fixed value over it. A peer offering many of them can corrupt heap metadata and abort the process.

Only provider signature algorithms which occupy one of the excess slots, and which the server also has configured, have this effect. Codepoints the replacement context does not recognise are discarded without being resolved to a slot, and provider signature algorithms are usable only from TLS 1.3.

The two contexts must therefore be aware of different numbers of provider signature algorithms, which requires separate library contexts, a provider loaded between the two being created, or providers which differ in what they advertise - in 4.0, for example, the default provider advertises SM2 where the FIPS provider does not. A deployment meeting the condition is also unable to negotiate the affected algorithms with legitimate clients, since the same stale count hides the corresponding certificates, so the misconfiguration is likely to be noticed. For that reason, and because the configuration is not the default, this issue has been assessed as Low severity.

FIPS impact: no No FIPS modules are affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-75804

Issue summary: OpenSSL QUIC stack does not enforce connection level flow control for streams. Remote peers may send more bytes as long as they fit within the stream flow control limits.

Impact summary: A malicious remote peer may exploit the lack of connection flow control for streams to make the QUIC stack receive ~100MB of memory instead of 768 KiB (default flow control window size).

CWE: CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Description: The local QUIC stack advertises two flow control limits to its remote peer: stream flow control limit and connection flow control limit. The remote peer must follow both limits when transmitting stream data.

Whenever the local QUIC stack receives a stream frame, it validates that the size of the received stream frame stays within flow control limits. If either limit is exceeded (stream level or connection level), then the QUIC stack must close the connection with a flow control error.

The vulnerable OpenSSL QUIC stack enforces the stream-level but not the connection-level limit. To exploit the issue, three conditions must be met:

• the remote peer opens several streams
• each stream must stay within the stream-level flow control limit
• there must be no zero-offset byte sent on any of the streams (to prevent the vulnerable QUIC stack from consuming data). By meeting the conditions above, the remote peer may make the local stack allocate 2 x MAX_STREAMS x (stream flow control limit) bytes of memory. MAX_STREAMS defaults to 100, and the limit applies to both bidirectional and unidirectional streams, making it 200 in total. The default flow control window for a stream is 512kB. The remote peer may force the vulnerable QUIC stack to allocate 100MB of heap per connection.

FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as the QUIC implementation is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-75805

Issue summary: A CMP client that requests certificate revocation on the basis of a PKCS#10 CSR may dereference a NULL pointer and terminate abnormally when processing a crafted revocation response.

Impact summary: The NULL pointer dereference happens on a read which leads to a crash and a Denial of Service for the affected client application.

CWE: CWE-476: NULL-pointer dereference

Description: A CMP client revoking a certificate has to tell the server which certificate to revoke, and may do so by supplying a PKCS#10 CSR instead of the certificate itself or its issuer name and serial number. This is ‘openssl cmp -cmd rr -csr ’ on the command line, or OSSL_CMP_exec_RR_ses() with the certificate supplied via OSSL_CMP_CTX_set1_p10CSR() through the API.

A CSR does not contain the issuer name and serial number of the certificate, so the client does not send them. A server may optionally name the certificate it revoked in its response, and the client then compares that name against what it sent. Having sent neither an issuer name nor a serial number, it has nothing to compare against, and a server returning a specially crafted name causes the client to read from a NULL pointer and crash.

The revocation response is checked for valid message protection before the affected code is reached, so an attacker must be a malicious or compromised CMP server, or a man-in-the-middle in possession of the secret used for message protection. Clients that identify the certificate to be revoked by a certificate or by issuer and serial number rather than by a PKCS#10 CSR are not affected.

FIPS impact: no No FIPS modules are affected by this issue, as the CMP protocol implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-75806

Issue summary: An established DTLS 1.2 association using an AEAD cipher suite can be terminated by a single unauthenticated datagram whose encrypted fragment is shorter than the mandatory explicit IV and authentication tag overhead.

Impact summary: An attacker who can send a datagram that is routed to an existing DTLS 1.2 association can tear that association down without knowing any key material. This is a Denial of Service limited to the targeted association. There is no memory safety or confidentiality impact.

CWE: CWE-1284: Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input

Description: In TLS 1.2 and DTLS 1.2 every record protected by an AEAD cipher suite carries an explicit IV followed by the ciphertext and an authentication tag. When decrypting such a record the record layer passed the record length to the cipher implementation before checking that the record was long enough to contain the explicit IV and the tag. For a record shorter than that overhead the cipher implementation rejected the impossible length, and the record layer treated this as an internal failure and raised a fatal internal_error alert instead of treating the record as one that failed authentication.

In TLS 1.2 the same record causes a fatal internal_error alert instead of the expected bad_record_mac alert. Since any undecryptable record already terminates a TLS connection, this is a protocol conformance issue rather than a security issue in TLS.

The fix validates the record length against the explicit IV and tag length before any AEAD processing, so that TLS reports bad_record_mac and DTLS silently discards the record.

FIPS impact: no The affected code is outside the FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-77696

Issue summary: SM2 signature generation uses non-constant-time arithmetic on secret values, forming a timing side-channel.

Impact summary: An attacker able to measure SM2 signing times may learn information about the per-signature secret nonce, which over many signatures can, via a lattice / Hidden Number Problem attack, lead to recovery of the private key.

CWE: CWE-208: Observable Timing Discrepancy

Description: SM2 signature generation computes the signature value using variable-time BIGNUM operations on the secret nonce and the private key, so the time taken to produce an SM2 signature depends on these secret values, forming a timing side-channel.

Applications performing SM2 signature generation are affected on all platforms.

FIPS Impact: no SM2 is not a FIPS algorithm.

CVE-2026-84782

Issue summary: The DTLS retransmission logic does not correctly handle a handshake message write that is suspended part-way through. The retransmitted message can be read past the message buffer and the retransmission overwrites the internal state the suspended write needs to resume correctly.

Impact summary: The retransmitted message can disclose a heap memory to the peer as plaintext handshake data or cause a crash and a Denial of Service when the read reaches an unmapped memory region.

CWE: CWE-125: Out-of-bounds Read

Description: DTLS handshake messages can be written out in multiple fragments, and a write can suspend mid-message (returning WANT_WRITE) if the underlying transport temporarily cannot accept more data. While such a write is suspended, the DTLS retransmission timer may independently fire and ask the retransmission logic to resend an earlier, already-acknowledged-as-sent message from its retransmit queue.

The retransmission logic reused the same internal buffer and position tracking as the message that was still being written, without resetting the position back to the start of the message being retransmitted. As a result the retransmission was read starting from wherever the suspended write had left off, producing a mislabelled message whose body was leftover bytes from the other, larger message still in flight - content that was never meant to be sent at that point, and which could run past the end of the allocated buffer.

Separately, even when the retransmission is positioned correctly, allowing it to run to completion while another write is suspended overwrites the same shared bookkeeping that the suspended write depends on to resume. When the application later resumes the suspended write (via a subsequent SSL_read(), SSL_write(), SSL_accept(), or SSL_connect() call), it finds that bookkeeping in a state inconsistent with the message and aborts the process in a debugging build.

The fix resets the retransmission’s read position to the start of the message before resending, and skips retransmission entirely whenever a handshake write is still suspended, deferring to the next call that resumes it instead.

FIPS impact: no The affected code is outside the FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-84783

Issue summary: The first concurrent use of the same X.509 certificate by several threads may cause its cached extension data to be freed while another thread is still using it.

Impact summary: A remote, unauthenticated peer could crash a multi-threaded TLS client, or a multi-threaded TLS server that requests client certificates, if the first certificate chains built to the same trusted CA certificate are built by several connections at the same time. This is a use-after-free read, which is likely to crash the process, resulting in a Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-416: Use After Free

Description: OpenSSL caches the decoded values of a certificate’s X.509v3 extensions inside the X509 object the first time they are needed. In OpenSSL 4.0 this cache is built in two phases: the extension values are computed while holding a read lock on the certificate, and the results are then installed into the certificate under a write lock. Because a read lock does not exclude other readers, several threads can compute the cache for the same certificate at the same time. Each thread that subsequently acquires the write lock installs its own results and frees the values installed by the thread before it, even though that earlier thread has already marked the cache as complete and may have returned pointers into it to its caller. A caller still using those pointers then reads freed memory.

Any certificate shared between threads is exposed the first time its extensions are decoded. In TLS the certificates at risk are the trusted CA certificates supplied for chain verification, by whatever means, since these are shared by every connection and their extensions are decoded and cached the first time a chain is built to them. Certificates sent by the peer are decoded separately for each connection and are not shared, so they are not affected. In a TLS client verifying server certificates, or a TLS server that requests and verifies client certificates, the use-after-free could only occur if the first chains built to the same trusted CA are built by several connections at the same time.

FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as X.509 certificate handling is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

OpenSSL 4.0 is vulnerable to this issue.

OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are not affected by this issue.

OpenSSL 4.0 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 4.0.3.

This issue was reported on 27 August 2026 by Tim Becker (Xint.io) and independently in a public report on 31 August 2026 by aydinmercan.

The fix has been developed by Bob Beck.

– cut (non-publishing metadata for internal use) – Reported by: Tim Becker (Xint.io), aydinmercan Fixed by: Bob Beck

CVE-2026-84784

Issue summary: A malicious remote peer may flood the local QUIC stack with NEW_CONNECTION_ID frames by avoiding a limit check on how many connection IDs the remote QUIC stack can use.

Impact summary: The local QUIC stack sends a RETIRE_CONN_ID frame for every NEW_CONNECTION_ID frame it receives. The RETIRE_CONN_ID frame is dispatched via the Control Frame Queue (CFQ). If the remote peer also withholds ACKs, then it can force the local stack to allocate ~400MB (depending on ACK delay).

CWE: CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Description: RFC 9000 sections 5.1.1 and 5.1.2 [1] describe the mechanism by which a remote peer can notify the local QUIC stack to change the destination connection ID (a.k.a. CID) the local stack uses to identify the connection at the remote peer. Each CID is associated with a sequence number. The sequence number is transmitted in NEW_CONNECTION_ID and RETIRE_CONNECTION_ID frames to identify the CID which is being either associated with a connection or retired.

The remote peer sends a NEW_CONNECTION_ID frame to let the local stack know a new CID is being associated with an existing connection. The NEW_CONNECTION_ID frame carries the new CID, its sequence number, and the retire-prior-to number. The retire-prior-to identifies existing CIDs that are to be retired. The local QUIC stack must send a RETIRE_CONNECTION_ID for every destination CID whose sequence number is less than retire-prior-to. The CID becomes retired after the local stack receives an ACK for its RETIRE_CONNECTION_ID frame.

Although the OpenSSL QUIC stack supports at most one destination CID for every connection, it can be tricked into processing more than one RETIRE_CONNECTION_ID frame per connection. The OpenSSL QUIC stack currently retires the destination CID as soon as it receives the NEW_CONNECTION_ID, while in fact the destination CID must be retired after an ACK for the RETIRE_CONNECTION_ID frame is received. Correcting the flawed logic also fixes the backlog growth.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9000#name-issuing-connection-ids

FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as the QUIC implementation is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-75803

Issue summary: ChaCha20-Poly1305 and AES-OCB decryption with an empty ciphertext can report success without verifying the supplied authentication tag when the operation is finalized by calling the EVP_Cipher() function.

Impact summary: Applications calling EVP_Cipher() on an empty ciphertext and expecting the call to check the AEAD tag may accept forged messages.

CWE: CWE-354 (Improper Validation of Integrity Check Value)

Description: The EVP_Cipher() API call for AEAD ciphers behaves like a one shot encryption and decryption call. It also verifies the AEAD tag after the decryption operation. However for AES-OCB and ChaCha20-Poly1305 ciphers it skipped the AEAD tag verification when an empty ciphertext was passed to the function. The callers of this function might believe that a successful return indicates a valid AEAD tag for these ciphers, even when that has not truly been validated in this case.

FIPS impact: no The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this CVE as the affected algorithms are not FIPS approved and thus not implemented in the FIPS module.

CVE-2026-14457

Issue summary: In a server or client configuration with RFC7250 Raw Public Keys (RPKs) enabled, and only the private key (with no associated certificate) configured locally, a NULL pointer dereference may occur when the remote peer solicits raw public keys and also sends the typically omitted “signature_algorithms_cert” TLS extension.

Impact summary: The impact is limited to a possible Denial of Service as a result of an application abort, no data disclosure or remote command execution are possible.

CWE: CWE-476: NULL Pointer Dereference

Description: While a passing comment in sample code in the documentation suggests that key-only RPK configurations are supported, the best-practice RPK configuration is to always configure a corresponding certificate (possibly self-signed or signed by any convenient CA).

When the private key is configured along with a matching certificate, the “signature_algorithms_cert” extension is handled reliably even without the fix, and peer clients or servers that don’t support raw public keys may be able to complete a TLS connection by pinning or verifying the corresponding certificate or its public key.

Deployments that prefer to configure just a private key with no certificate need to upgrade to an updated release as noted below.

FIPS impact: no

No FIPS modules are affected by this issue, as the SSL protocol implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-18798

Issue summary: QUIC server may double free QRX (QUIC record layer RX) object when channel creation fails for initial packet.

Impact summary: Double free leads to heap corruption, which typically results in termination of QUIC server process, leading to Denial of Service. There is so far no evidence that this double free is exploitable for remote code execution, thus it is considered highly improbable.

CWE: CWE-415: Double Free

Description: In order to validate initial packet, OpenSSL QUIC stack default packet handler (port_default_packet_handler()) creates a so-called QRX object. If the initial packet validates successfully with QRX object, the default packet handler proceeds to channel (connection object) creation. The QRX object used for packet validation is passed to port_bind_channel(), so it becomes part of the newly created connection. If port_bind_channel() fails, then it also frees the QRX object. Once port_bind_channel() returns, the port_default_packet_handler() detects the failure and proceeds to the error branch, where the same QRX object is freed for the second time.

The failure in port_bind_channel() function can be induced with a relatively low effort by a malformed (non RFC 9000 compliant) INITIAL packet. If the packet carries DCID (destination connection ID) which is shorter than 8 bytes, then port_bind_channel() jumps to the error path after ossl_quic_lcidm_enrol_odcid() detects that the DCID has invalid length.

FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected, as the QUIC implementation is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-54874

Issue summary: Receiving a DTLS record for a future epoch while a handshake is in progress causes OpenSSL to buffer far more memory than the record itself requires.

Impact summary: A peer can use a small amount of network traffic to make an OpenSSL DTLS endpoint retain a disproportionately large amount of memory, which may lead to a Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-405: Asymmetric Resource Consumption (Amplification)

Description: While a DTLS handshake is in progress, a peer may legitimately have already moved on to the next epoch (for example, having sent its ChangeCipherSpec and Finished messages) before the local endpoint has processed the same transition, typically because of reordering on the underlying UDP transport. OpenSSL buffers such early records so that they can be processed once the local endpoint catches up.

Buffering a record currently retains the entire read buffer it arrived in, which is sized to hold the largest possible DTLS record (around 16 kilobytes), rather than just the bytes that make up the record itself. Up to 100 such records may be buffered per connection. As a result, a peer that sends a stream of small forged records claiming to belong to the next epoch can cause an OpenSSL DTLS endpoint to retain around 1.7 megabytes of memory, despite sending only a small fraction of that amount of data over the network.

An attacker therefore gains a memory amplification factor of around 1200, and can multiply the effect across as many associations as it is able to open, making this a remote memory exhaustion Denial of Service risk for DTLS servers. Since the memory retained per connection remains bounded, and any limit an application already places on the number of concurrent associations also bounds the total exposure, this issue has been assessed as Low severity.

FIPS impact: no

No FIPS modules are affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

OpenSSL 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are vulnerable to this issue.

OpenSSL 4.0 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 4.0.2. OpenSSL 3.6 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.6.4. OpenSSL 3.5 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.5.8. OpenSSL 3.4 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.4.7. OpenSSL 3.0 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.0.22.

Premium support customers only: OpenSSL 1.1.1 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 1.1.1zi OpenSSL 1.0.2 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.2zr

This issue was reported on 18 May 2026 by Amazon Web Services. The fix has been developed by Matt Caswell.

– cut (non-publishing metadata for internal use) – Reported by: Amazon Web Services Fixed by: Matt Caswell

CVE-2026-63072

Issue summary: OpenSSL CMS decryption sizes the key-unwrap output buffer based on querying the unwrapped key size, but the AES-WRAP-PAD unwrap primitive can write and cleanse more bytes than that query reports, causing an 8-byte out-of-bounds heap write.

Impact summary: An attacker who supplies a crafted CMS message can trigger a deterministic 8-byte out-of-bounds heap write when the victim decrypts it with CMS_decrypt(), corrupting the heap and typically resulting in a Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-787: Out-of-bounds Write

Description: The key-wrap OID is potentially attacker-controlled on the wire. CMS unwrapping allows both id-aesNNN-wrap-pad and id-aesNNN-wrap ciphers. An attacker can take a legitimate message and change a single OID byte to select the padded variant while leaving the message otherwise valid. Since the unwrap key is derived from the recipient’s private operation (ECDH key agreement or ML-KEM decapsulation), the RFC 5649 integrity check cannot pass, and the decryption fails with integrity failure.

The write is a fixed-size (8-byte), fixed-value (zero) heap overflow immediately past the allocation, requires no special configuration, and is reachable from the public CMS_decrypt() function. The consequence is a heap corruption leading to a Denial of Service. The fix in the CMS code sizes the unwrap output buffer for the worst case so a failed unwrap cannot write past the allocation.

FIPS impact: no

As the CMS code lives outside the FIPS module boundary, no FIPS modules are affected by this CVE.

CVE-2026-63073

Issue summary: OpenSSL CMP response validation passed an unexpected response sender distinguished name directly as the format string to ERR_raise_data().

Impact summary: A malicious or intercepted CMP endpoint can crash a CMP client that enforces an expected sender or uses a pinned server certificate whose subject becomes the default expected sender.

CWE: CWE-134 (Use of Externally-Controlled Format String)

Description: When validating a received CMP message, ossl_cmp_msg_check_update() converts the peer-supplied sender distinguished name with X509_NAME_oneline() and passes it directly as the format argument to ERR_raise_data(). Percent characters survive the conversion, so a sender DN such as “CN=%s%n” reaches BIO_vsnprintf() as an attacker-controlled format string with no matching variadic arguments. This path is only reached when the caller configures an expected sender or pins a server certificate, which is the normal configuration for a CMP client validating server responses.

Since the attacker controls the format string but none of the variadic arguments, such specifiers as %s and %n dereference or write through unrelated stack contents and crash the client. The reliable consequence is a denial of service, when the response comes from a malicious or intercepted CMP endpoint. There is no controlled memory write, arbitrary-address read, or reliable path to remote code execution.

FIPS impact: no

No FIPS modules are affected by this issue, as the CMP protocol implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-63074

Issue summary: The OpenSSL Certificate Management Protocol (CMP) caches additional certificates (extraCerts) sent in a CMP message, but never expunges them (for instance if they are invalid). If a server reuses an OSSL_CMP_CTX frequently, this cache of extraCerts may grow unboundedly, and a malicious client may flood a CMP server with requests driving this growth.

Impact summary: Users utilizing a CMP server that reuses a single OSSL_CMP_CTX for the lifetime of a server process may observe unbounded memory growth in the event a malicious client repeatedly sends requests containing unique extra certificates, which may lead to OOM conditions.

CWE: CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Description: If a remote user sends CMP messages to a server with a list of extraCerts and the message is rejected, the extraCerts from the message remains in the server contexts untrusted certificate stack. This exposes servers with long lived ctx objects to Denial of Service attacks in which an attacker sends messages intending to be rejected with a large list of additional certificates repeatedly, forcing the server to store them indefinitely.

The issue was fixed by removing the added extra certs if the message is rejected, using the same method as when the context is configured to not do caching at all.

FIPS impact: no As the CMP code lives outside the FIPS module boundary, no FIPS modules are affected by this CVE.

CVE-2026-63075

Issue summary: When OpenSSL processes QUIC traffic from a peer that repeatedly sends ack-eliciting packets while not acknowledging ACK-only responses, the QUIC stack can retain ACK-only packet metadata for the lifetime of the connection.

Impact summary: A remote peer that can complete a QUIC handshake can cause connection-scoped memory growth which may lead to Denial of Service through memory exhaustion, especially with sustained traffic or many concurrent QUIC connections.

CWE: CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Description: When the OpenSSL QUIC stack sends an ACK-only packet, there is no requirement by the QUIC protocol that the peer will acknowledge that ACK-only packet (i.e. it is itself not ack-eliciting). However, the OpenSSL implementation stores the metadata about the ACK frames regardless. In and of itself that’s ok, but if a malicious peer establishes a connection, and then drives the connection such that ACK-only packets are forced from the OpenSSL implementation peer (i.e., by sending numerous PING frames), and then withholding any subsequent acks for ack-eliciting data, like legitimate data, said malicious peer can force inappropriate memory growth on the OpenSSL peer, potentially leading to a Denial of Service.

The fix is to ensure that we account for the transmission of the ACK-only packet in the packet histories high and low watermark without actually storing the ACK-only packet metadata itself.

FIPS impact: no The OpenSSL FIPS module is not affected as the QUIC code is outside the FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-63076

Issue summary: OpenSSL CMP password based protection verification only checks whether the protectionAlg parameter was not NULL and not its ASN.1 type, before treating it as a PBMParameter. A crafted message can contain a parameter of a different type, which is then dereferenced as an invalid pointer.

Impact summary: A remote, unauthenticated attacker can crash an application acting as a CMP server that accepts PBM-protected messages, or a CMP client talking to a malicious or intercepted CMP server, resulting in a Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-476: NULL Pointer Dereference

Description: When verifying the password-based MAC protection of a CMP message, OpenSSL library reads the protectionAlg algorithm parameter with X509_ALGOR_get0(), which returns both the parameter type and its value pointer. The value is then cast to an ASN1_STRING and treated as the expected PBMParameter after only checking that pointer is not NULL. The parameter type returned by X509_ALGOR_get0() was never consulted.

This happens during protection verification, before any MAC is computed, so no knowledge of the PBM shared secret is required; the only precondition is that PBM verification is reachable. On the server side this is reached from OSSL_CMP_SRV_process_request() for any application that stands up a CMP server accepting PBM-protected messages, and on the client side from CMP response validation against a malicious or on-path (MITM) server. The reliable consequence is a denial of service; there is no memory disclosure, no controlled memory write, and no path to code execution. CMP is a specialized feature that an application must explicitly enable.

FIPS impact: no As the CMP code lives outside the FIPS module boundary, no FIPS modules are affected by this CVE.

CVE-2026-14456

Issue summary: When an OpenSSL QUIC server (Listener SSL object) processes valid QUIC Initial packets for unknown destination connection IDs, it can allocate and queue new incoming channels without enforcing any limit.

Impact summary: A remote peer that can make many Initial packets reach the server listener faster than the application accepts connections, can cause the memory allocated to store the per-channel state to grow without any limits, potentially making the QUIC listener unavailable and causing Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Description: The function that handles inbound QUIC packets uses Connection-Id from the packet header to find an existing connection (QUIC channel). If no existing connection is found and the packet type is INITIAL, the function treats the packet as a new connection. It allocates a new channel object and inserts it into a queue where it waits to be accepted by the local application with SSL_accept(3ossl). The memory occupied by these initial channel objects may grow without bounds if the application is not able to call SSL_accept() frequently enough to serve these inbound connection requests.

The issue is present since OpenSSL 3.5 when the QUIC server implementation was added.

The fix introduces a limit for pending connections. The default limit is set to 256 pending connections (waiting to be accepted by the local application). Applications may change the default by calling SSL_set_value_uint(3ossl).

FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as the QUIC implementation is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-54876

Issue summary: A malicious TLS server can cause a memory leak in a TLS client that has enabled OCSP response checking by sending an OCSP response that contains no single response entries.

Impact summary: An attacker can leak an attacker-tunable amount of memory per TLS handshake in a victim client application. A long-running client that repeatedly connects to a malicious server can have its memory exhausted, resulting in a Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-401: Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Description: The affected function is called during X.509 certificate chain verification when OCSP response checking is enabled with the X509_V_FLAG_OCSP_RESP_CHECK or X509_V_FLAG_OCSP_RESP_CHECK_ALL verification flags, for example when a TLS client verifies an OCSP response stapled into the TLS handshake by the server.

When the received BasicOCSPResponse contains an empty SEQUENCE OF SingleResponse, which is permitted on the wire and accepted by the OpenSSL decoder, the OCSP_BASICRESP structure allocated by OCSP_response_get1_basic() was not freed because an early return bypassed the cleanup code at the end of the function.

The amount of memory leaked per handshake can be amplified by the attacker by padding the certs field of the BasicOCSPResponse with bogus certificates, which are parsed and stored in the leaked structure before the empty response check triggers the early return. A long-running TLS client that repeatedly connects to a malicious server can have its memory exhausted over time.

OCSP response checking is not enabled by default. Only client applications that explicitly enable the OCSP response check verification flags are affected.

FIPS impact: no

The FIPS modules in 4.0 and 3.6 are not affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-34180

Issue summary: Parsing a crafted DER-encoded ASN.1 structure with a primitive element whose content exceeds 2 gigabytes in length may cause a heap buffer over-read on 64-bit Unix and Unix-like platforms.

Impact summary: The heap buffer over-read may crash the application (Denial of Service) or to load into the decoded ASN.1 object contents of memory beyond the end of the input buffer. More typically such ASN.1 elements would instead be truncated.

An integer truncation in OpenSSL’s ASN.1 decoder causes the content length of an ASN.1 primitive element to be mishandled when it exceeds 2 gigabytes. In the worst case the truncated length is treated as a request to scan the binary content for a terminating zero byte, possibly causing OpenSSL to read either less than or beyond the end of the allocated buffer.

Applications that pass attacker-supplied data to d2i_X509(), d2i_PKCS7(), or any other d2i_* decoding function are affected. OpenSSL’s own command-line tools are not vulnerable, as data read through the BIO layer is checked before it reaches the affected code. The issue only affects 64-bit Unix and Unix-like platforms; 32-bit platforms and 64-bit Windows are not affected.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-34181

Issue Summary: The PKCS#12 file processing fails to perform sufficient input validation for files that use Password-Based Message Authentication Code 1 (PBMAC1) integrity mechanism allowing a certificate and private key forgery.

Impact Summary: An attacker impersonating a user can cause a service reading PKCS#12 files to accept forged certificates and private keys with a 1 in 256 probability.

If a service accepting PKCS#12 files is using passwords for authenticating the received files, the attacker can create unencrypted PKCS#12 files that use PBMAC1 authentication that specifies an HMAC key of only one byte, allowing them to craft a file that will be accepted with a 1 in 256 probability. That would then cause the service to accept a certificate and private key controlled by the attacker.

The FIPS modules are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-34182

Issue Summary: Cryptographic Message Services (CMS) processing fails to perform sufficient input validation on the cipher and tag length fields of AuthEnvelopedData containers, leading to various potential compromises.

Impact Summary: Attackers making use of these vulnerabilities may achieve key-equivalent functionality for a given CMS recipient and/or bypass integrity validation for a given message.

In one use case, an attacker may send a CMS message containing AuthEnvelopedData with the cipher specified as a non-AEAD cipher. OpenSSL erroneously allows this selection, and attempts to decrypt and validate the message.

An on-path attacker who captures one legitimate AES-GCM AuthEnvelopedData addressed to the victim can re-emit it with the recipientInfos set left byte-for-byte intact, so the victim’s private key still unwraps the genuine CEK (the content-encryption key), but with the inner OID rewritten to AES-256-OFB (Output Feedback Mode, an unauthenticated keystream mode) and with an attacker-chosen IV and ciphertext. The victim initializes AES-256-OFB under the real CEK, never consults the MAC field, and CMS_decrypt() returns success.

If the application under attack responds to the attacker with any indicator showing success or failure of the decryption effort, it is possible for the attacker to use this as an oracle to obtain key equivalent functionality for the CEK used for the chosen recipient of the message.

In another use case, an attacker can reduce the tag length of the chosen AEAD cipher for a given AuthEnvelopedData container to be a single byte long, allowing an attacker to brute force CMS decryption, producing an integrity bypass for applications that trust CMS_decrypt() to reject modified content.

The FIPS modules are not affected by this issue.

CVE-2026-34183

Issue summary: Remote peer may exhaust heap memory of the QUIC server or client by flooding it with packets containing PATH_CHALLENGE frames.

Impact summary: A malicious remote peer can cause an unbounded memory allocation which can lead to an abnormal termination of the application acting as a QUIC client or server and a Denial of Service.

A remote peer may exhaust heap memory by flooding the local QUIC stack with PATH_CHALLENGE frames. The local QUIC stack allocates a PATH_RESPONSE frame for every PATH_CHALLENGE it receives. The allocated PATH_RESPONSE frame gets freed only when the remote peer acknowledges reception of the PATH_RESPONSE frame which will not be done by a malicious peer.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue. The QUIC stack is outside of OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-35188

Issue summary: A malicious server can exploit TLS OCSP stapling by delivering a crafted response through the status_request extension, triggering a double-free in the client’s certificate verification path.

Impact summary: Successful exploitation allows an attacker to corrupt heap memory via a double-free, potentially leading to a Denial of Service or possibly an attacker controlled code execution or other undefined behavior.

If OCSP stapling is enabled and the TLS client connects to a malicious server, a crafted OCSP stapled response can trigger a double free in the TLS client when the stapled response is checked.

The OCSP stapling is not enabled by default. Reliable code execution through a double-free is technically complex and highly environment-dependent but the Denial of Service impact is straightforward to achieve, warranting Moderate severity.

No FIPS modules are affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-42764

Issue summary: Receiving a QUIC initial packet with an invalid token may trigger a NULL pointer dereference in the OpenSSL QUIC server with address validation disabled.

Impact summary: NULL pointer dereference typically causes abnormal termination of the affected QUIC server process and a Denial of Service.

If the address validation is disabled in the OpenSSL QUIC server implementation, an attacker can crash the server by sending an initial packet with an invalid or expired token.

By default, the client address validation is enabled in the OpenSSL QUIC server implementation, which makes the default configuration not vulnerable to this issue. However if the SSL_LISTENER_FLAG_NO_VALIDATE is used with the SSL_new_listener() call, the address validation is disabled making the vulnerable code reachable.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-42765

Issue summary: When a partial-chain certificate verification is enabled together with OCSP response checking for the whole chain, a NULL dereference will happen if the verified chain does not have a self-signed trusted anchor, crashing the process.

Impact summary: A NULL pointer dereference can trigger a crash which leads to a Denial of Service for an application.

When performing OCSP response checking for certificates in the verification chain, the code always tries to access the next certificate as the issuer. There is a check for a self-signed certificate. However with the partial chain verification enabled when the chain does not have a self-signed trusted anchor, the issuer will be NULL for the last certificate in the chain. A NULL pointer dereference then happens.

This issue affects only applications which enable both OCSP verification of the certificate chain (X509_V_FLAG_OCSP_RESP_CHECK_ALL) and partial chain verification (X509_V_FLAG_PARTIAL_CHAIN) in the certificate verification. Both flags are disabled by default. For that reason, we have assigned Low severity to the issue.

No FIPS modules are affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-42766

Issue summary: A specially crafted password-encrypted CMS message can trigger a NULL pointer dereference during CMS decryption.

Impact summary: This NULL pointer dereference leads to an application crash and a Denial of Service.

The CMS PasswordRecipientInfo.keyDerivationAlgorithm field is defined as OPTIONAL in the ASN.1 specification and may therefore be absent in specially crafted inputs. During the password-based CMS decryption the OpenSSL CMS implementation dereferences this field without first checking whether it was present.

An attacker who supplies such a CMS message to an application performing password-based CMS decryption can trigger an application crash, leading to a Denial of Service.

Applications that process password-encrypted CMS messages may be affected.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-42767

Issue summary: An attacker-controlled CMP (Certificate Management Protocol) server could trigger a NULL pointer dereference in a CMP client application.

Impact summary: A NULL pointer dereference causes a crash of the application and a Denial of Service.

An attacker controlling a CMP server (or acting as a man-in-the-middle) could craft a CMP response containing a CRMF (Certificate Request Message Format) CertRepMessage with an EncryptedValue structure where the symmAlg field has an algorithm OID but no parameters field. When the OpenSSL CMP client processes this response, the NULL dereference occurs, causing a crash of the CMP client.

Applications that process untrusted CMP/CRMF messages may be affected.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-42768

Issue summary: The CMS_decrypt and PKCS7_decrypt functions are vulnerable to Bleichenbacher-style attack when an attacker is able to provide the CMS or S/MIME messages and observe the error code and/or decryption output.

Impact summary: The Bleichenbacher-style attack allows an attacker to use the victim’s vulnerable application as a way to decrypt or sign messages with the victim’s private RSA key.

The attack is possible in 2 variants.

1. The decryption API (CMS_decrypt(), PKCS7_decrypt()) is used without providing the recipient certificate. In this case OpenSSL iterates over every KeyTransRecipientInfo (KTRI) without stopping at the first success.

An attacker who authors a message with two KTRI entries — the first one wrapping a real CEK under the victim’s public key, the second with an arbitrary probe ciphertext — obtains opportunity to iterate the 2nd KTRI to get a valid PKCS#1 v1.5 padding if the error code of the application is available.

That is a Bleichenbacher oracle (Bleichenbacher, CRYPTO ‘98): an adaptive-chosen-ciphertext side channel from which the attacker decrypts any RSA ciphertext to the victim’s key or forges any PKCS#1 v1.5 signature under it.

2. When the decryption API (CMS_decrypt(), PKCS7_decrypt()) is provided with the recipient certificate, and the recipient is not found, a random key is substituted.

An attacker who authors a message and is able to compare both error code and the result of the decryption, can mount a Bleichenbacher oracle.

We are not aware of any applications that provide a remote attacker an opportunity to mount an attack described in these scenarios. We consider the existence of such application very unlikely, and for this reason this CVE has been evaluated as Low severity.

To avoid these attacks, when RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 Key Transport is in use, the invoked EVP_PKEY_decrypt() will use the implicit rejection mechanism described in draft-irtf-cfrg-rsa-guidance. In previous OpenSSL releases the implicit rejection was explicitly disabled.

The implicit rejection mechanism always returns a plaintext value, the symmetric key. This result is deterministic for the ciphertext and the private key. The length of the decryption result can happen to match the length of the key of the symmetric cipher that was used for the content encryption. When a certificate is not provided, the last RecipientInfo producing a key that looks valid will be used. It may cause getting garbage content on decryption. As a proper way to deal with this a recipient certificate has to be provided to identify the particular RecipientInfo for decryption.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, and 3.4 are not affected by this issue, as CMS and S/MIME processing happens outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-42769

Issue Summary: An error in the callback used to verify the certificate provided in a Root CA key update Certificate Management Protocol (CMP) message response rendered the certificate validation ineffectual, which could lead to escalation of credentials from the Registration Authority (RA) level to the root Certification Authority (root CA) level.

Impact Summary: The Registration Autority could replace the root CA certificate for the CMP clients with an arbitrary root CA certificate.

One of the parts of the Certificate Management Protocol (CMP), specified in RFC 9810, is Root Certification Authority (root CA) key Rollover, which is sent by the server in a message with type ‘id-it-rootCaKeyUpdate’. As part of these messages, ’newWithOld’ certificate, the new root CA certificate signed with the old root CA key, is provided, and verifying its signature is crucial for transferring the trust from the old CA key to the new one.

The ‘id-it-rootCaKeyUpdate’ messages are expected to be processed with OSSL_CMP_get1_rootCaKeyUpdate(), that is expected to verify the ’newWithOld’ certificate. A typo in the certificate chain building code led to adding an incorrect certificate (’newWithOld’ instead of ‘oldRoot’) to the certificate chain, rendering the certificate verification process ineffectual (only the issuer name and the algorithm OIDs were verified by other parts of the verification code).

An attacker who already has credentials that satisfy the CMP message protection checks can generate a new key pair and use a crafted self-signed certificate in its ‘id-it-rootCaKeyUpdate’ CMP messages which affected CMP clients would accept as a new trust anchor.

Significant preconditions for the attack (having valid RA-level credentials) are the reason the issue was assigned Low severity.

The FIPS modules are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-42770

Issue summary: When EVP_PKEY_derive_set_peer() is called with a DHX (X9.42) peer key, the peer key is not properly checked for the subgroup membership.

Impact summary: A malicious peer which presents an X9.42 key carrying the victim’s p and g parameters, a forged q = r (a small prime factor of the cofactor (p−1)/q_local), and a public value Y of order r can recover the victim’s private key after a small number of key exchange attempts.

When EVP_PKEY_derive_set_peer() is called with a DHX (X9.42) peer key, the subgroup membership check Y^q ≡ 1 (mod p) is performed using the peer’s own q parameter, not the local key’s q. The peer’s domain parameters are then matched against the domain parameters of the private key, but the value of q is not compared.

A malicious peer who presents an X9.42 key carrying the victim’s p, g, a forged q = r (a small prime factor of the cofactor), and a public value Y of order r passes all checks. The shared secret then takes only r distinct values, leaking priv mod r. Repeating for each small-prime factor of the cofactor and combining via CRT recovers the full private key (Lim–Lee / small-subgroup-confinement attack).

The realistic attack surface is narrow: principally CMP deployments with long-lived RA/CA DHX keys and bespoke enterprise or government applications using X9.42 DHX static keys with interactive protocols and therefore this issue was assigned Low severity.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.1.2 and 3.0 are affected by this issue.

CVE-2026-42771

Issue summary: When the X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_email is called by an application to validate a crafted e-mail address, such as during S/MIME message validation, an out of bounds read can happen.

Impact summary: This out of bounds read will not directly exfiltrate the data read to the attacker so the most likely result is a crash and a Denial of Service.

An internal helper function called from X509_VERIFY_PARAM_[set|add]_email() used a wrong length when validating the local part of an email address. This could cause the 64 octet limit on the local part of an email address to be not enforced, or cause an out of bound read and potentially a crash.

The bug is reachable via S-MIME validation with a crafted From: address supplied in an email message that can potentially cause a crash.

No FIPS modules are affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-45445

Issue summary: When an application drives an AES-OCB context through the public EVP_Cipher() one-shot interface, the application-supplied initialisation vector (IV) is silently discarded.

Impact summary: Every message encrypted under the same key uses the same effective nonce regardless of the IV supplied by the caller, resulting in (key, nonce) reuse and loss of confidentiality. If the same code path is used to compute the authentication tag, the tag depends only on the (key, IV) pair and not on the plaintext or ciphertext, allowing universal forgery of arbitrary ciphertext from a single captured message.

OpenSSL provides two ways to drive a cipher: the documented streaming interface (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) and a lower-level one-shot, EVP_Cipher(), whose documentation explicitly recommends against use by applications in favour of EVP_CipherUpdate() and EVP_CipherFinal_ex(). The OCB provider’s streaming handler flushes the application-supplied IV into the OCB context before processing data; the one-shot handler did not. Every call to EVP_Cipher() on an AES-OCB context therefore ran with the all-zero key-derived offset state left by cipher initialisation, regardless of the caller’s IV.

If EVP_EncryptFinal_ex() is subsequently used to obtain the authentication tag, the deferred IV setup runs at that point and clears the running checksum that should have been accumulated over the plaintext. The resulting tag is a function of (key, IV) only and verifies against any ciphertext produced under the same (key, IV) pair.

The OpenSSL SSL/TLS implementation is not affected: AES-OCB is not a TLS cipher suite, and libssl does not call EVP_Cipher() in any case. Applications that drive AES-OCB through the documented streaming AEAD API (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) are not affected. Only applications that combine the AES-OCB cipher with the EVP_Cipher() one-shot API are vulnerable.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as AES-OCB is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-45446

Issue summary: The implementations of AES-SIV (RFC 5297) and AES-GCM-SIV (RFC 8452) mishandle the authentication of AAD (Additional Authenticated Data) with an empty ciphertext allowing a forgery of such messages.

Impact summary: An attacker can forge empty messages with arbitrary AAD to the victim’s application using these ciphers.

AES-SIV (RFC 5297) and AES-GCM-SIV (RFC 8452) are nonce-misuse-resistant AEAD modes: they accept a key, nonce, optional AAD (bytes that are authenticated but not encrypted), and plaintext, and produces ciphertext plus a 16-byte tag. On decrypt, EVP_DecryptFinal_ex() is documented to return success only if the tag is verified succesfully.

In OpenSSL’s provider implementation of these ciphers, the expected tag is computed only when decryption function is invoked with non-empty data. If the caller supplies AAD and then calls EVP_DecryptFinal_ex() without invocation of the ciphertext update, which can happen when the received ciphertext length is zero, the tag is never recalculated and still holds its all-zeros value.

When AES-GCM-SIV is used, an attacker who sends arbitrary AAD, empty ciphertext, and all-zeros tag passes authentication under any key they do not know, single-shot. When AES-SIV is used, for mounting the attack it’s necessary for the application to reuse the decryption context without resetting the key.

AES-SIV is implemented since OpenSSL 3.0. AES-GCM-SIV is implemented since OpenSSL 3.2.

No protocols implemented in OpenSSL itself (TLS/CMS/PKCS7/HPKE/QUIC) support either AES-GCM-SIV or AES-SIV. To mount an attack, the applications must implement their own protocol and use the EVP interface. Also they must skip the ciphertext update when a message with an empty ciphertext arrives.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as these algorithms are not FIPS approved and the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-45447

Issue summary: A specially crafted PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message could trigger a use-after-free during PKCS#7 signature verification.

Impact summary: A use-after-free may result in process crashes, heap corruption, or potentially remote code execution.

When processing a PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message, if the SignedData digestAlgorithms field is present as an empty ASN.1 SET, OpenSSL may incorrectly free a caller-owned BIO during PKCS7_verify(). A subsequent use of the BIO by the calling application results in a use-after-free condition.

In the common case this occurs when the application later calls BIO_free() on the BIO originally passed to PKCS7_verify(). Depending on allocator behavior and application-specific BIO usage patterns, this may result in a crash or other memory corruption. In some application contexts this may potentially be exploitable for remote code execution.

Applications that process PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages using OpenSSL PKCS#7 APIs may be affected. Applications using the CMS APIs for this processing are not affected.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-7383

Issue summary: A signed integer overflow when sizing the destination buffer for Unicode output in ASN1_mbstring_ncopy() can lead to a heap buffer overflow.

Impact summary: A heap buffer overflow may lead to a crash or possibly attacker controlled code execution or other undefined behaviour.

In ASN1_mbstring_copy() and ASN1_mbstring_ncopy() the destination size for Unicode output is computed in a signed int: by left shift of the input character count for BMPSTRING (UTF-16) and UNIVERSALSTRING (UTF-32), and by summing per-character byte counts for UTF8STRING. The calculation overflows when the input reaches around 2^30 characters. In the worst case (UNIVERSALSTRING at 2^30 characters) the size wraps to zero, OPENSSL_malloc(1) is called, and the subsequent character copy writes several gigabytes past the one-byte allocation.

X.509 certificate processing routes through ASN1_STRING_set_by_NID(), whose DIRSTRING_TYPE mask excludes UNIVERSALSTRING and whose per-NID size limits cap the input length; no network protocol or certificate-handling path in OpenSSL exercises the overflow. Triggering the bug requires an application that calls ASN1_mbstring_copy() or ASN1_mbstring_ncopy() directly, or registers a custom string type via ASN1_STRING_TABLE_add(), with attacker-controlled input on the order of half a gigabyte or more. For these reasons this issue was assigned Low severity.

The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVE-2026-9076

Issue summary: When CMS password-based decryption (RFC 3211 / PWRI key unwrap) processes attacker-supplied CMS data, an attacker-chosen stream-mode KEK cipher can trigger a heap out-of-bounds read in kek_unwrap_key().

Impact summary: A heap buffer over-read may trigger a crash which leads to Denial of Service for an application if the input buffer ends at a memory page boundary and the following page is unmapped. There is no information disclosure as the over-read bytes are not revealed to the attacker.

The key unwrapping function performs a check-byte test as specified in the RFC that reads 7 bytes from a heap allocation that is based on the wrapped key length from the message. There is a minimum length check based on the block length of the wrapping cipher. However the cipher is selected from an OID carried in the attacker’s PWRI keyEncryptionAlgorithm with no requirement that the cipher be a block cipher. When an attacker selects a stream-mode cipher the guard will be ineffective and the allocated buffer containing the unwrapped key can be too small to fit the check-bytes specified in the RFC and a buffer over-read can happen.

Applications calling CMS_decrypt() or CMS_decrypt_set1_password() (equivalently openssl cms -decrypt -pwri_password …) on untrusted CMS data are vulnerable to this issue. No password knowledge is required: the over-read happens during the unwrap attempt before any authentication succeeds.

The over-read is limited to a few bytes and is not written to output, so there is no information disclosure. Triggering a crash requires the allocation to border unmapped memory, which is unlikely with the normal allocator.

The FIPS modules are not affected by this issue.