Issue summary: A TLS 1.3 connection using certificate compression can be forced to allocate a large buffer before decompression without checking against the configured certificate size limit.
Impact summary: An attacker can cause per-connection memory allocations of up to approximately 22 MiB and extra CPU work, potentially leading to service degradation or resource exhaustion (Denial of Service).
In affected configurations, the peer-supplied uncompressed certificate length from a CompressedCertificate message is used to grow a heap buffer prior to decompression. This length is not bounded by the max_cert_list setting, which otherwise constrains certificate message sizes. An attacker can exploit this to cause large per-connection allocations followed by handshake failure. No memory corruption or information disclosure occurs.
This issue only affects builds where TLS 1.3 certificate compression is compiled in (i.e., not OPENSSL_NO_COMP_ALG) and at least one compression algorithm (brotli, zlib, or zstd) is available, and where the compression extension is negotiated. Both clients receiving a server CompressedCertificate and servers in mutual TLS scenarios receiving a client CompressedCertificate are affected. Servers that do not request client certificates are not vulnerable to client-initiated attacks.
Users can mitigate this issue by setting SSL_OP_NO_RX_CERTIFICATE_COMPRESSION to disable receiving compressed certificates.
The FIPS modules in 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.3 are not affected by this issue, as the TLS implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.
OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.3 are vulnerable to this issue.
OpenSSL 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are not affected by this issue.
Weakness
The product allocates memory based on an untrusted, large size value, but it does not ensure that the size is within expected limits, allowing arbitrary amounts of memory to be allocated.
Affected Software
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 | RedHat | openssl-1:3.5.1-7.el10_1 | * |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | RedHat | openssl-1:3.5.1-7.el9_7 | * |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | RedHat | openssl-1:3.5.1-7.el9_7 | * |
| Edk2 | Ubuntu | plucky | * |
| Nodejs | Ubuntu | esm-apps/jammy | * |
| Nodejs | Ubuntu | jammy | * |
| Openssl | Ubuntu | devel | * |
| Openssl | Ubuntu | plucky | * |
| Openssl | Ubuntu | questing | * |
| Openssl | Ubuntu | upstream | * |
Potential Mitigations
References
- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/3ed1f75249932b155eef993a8e66a99cb98bfef4
- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/6184a4fb08ee6d7bca570d931a4e8bef40b64451
- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/895150b5e021d16b52fb32b97e1dd12f20448be5
- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/966a2478046c311ed7dae50c457d0db4cafbf7e4
- https://openssl-library.org/news/secadv/20260127.txt