CVE-2025-69421

Issue summary: Processing a malformed PKCS#12 file can trigger a NULL pointer dereference in the PKCS12_item_decrypt_d2i_ex() function.

Impact summary: A NULL pointer dereference can trigger a crash which leads to Denial of Service for an application processing PKCS#12 files.

The PKCS12_item_decrypt_d2i_ex() function does not check whether the oct parameter is NULL before dereferencing it. When called from PKCS12_unpack_p7encdata() with a malformed PKCS#12 file, this parameter can be NULL, causing a crash. The vulnerability is limited to Denial of Service and cannot be escalated to achieve code execution or memory disclosure.

Exploiting this issue requires an attacker to provide a malformed PKCS#12 file to an application that processes it. For that reason the issue was assessed as Low severity according to our Security Policy.

The FIPS modules in 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the PKCS#12 implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are vulnerable to this issue.

Weakness

The product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

References

• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/3524a29271f8191b8fd8a5257eb05173982a097b
• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/36ecb4960872a4ce04bf6f1e1f4e78d75ec0c0c7
• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/4bbc8d41a72c842ce4077a8a3eccd1109aaf74bd
• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/643986985cd1c21221f941129d76fe0c2785aeb3
• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/a2dbc539f0f9cc63832709fa5aa33ad9495eb19c
• https://openssl-library.org/news/secadv/20260127.txt