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.
Weakness
The product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.
Affected Software
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Openssl | Openssl | 3.0.0 (including) | 3.0.23 (excluding) |
| Openssl | Openssl | 3.4.0 (including) | 3.4.8 (excluding) |
| Openssl | Openssl | 3.5.0 (including) | 3.5.9 (excluding) |
| Openssl | Openssl | 3.6.0 (including) | 3.6.5 (excluding) |
| Openssl | Openssl | 4.0.0 (including) | 4.0.3 (excluding) |
| Red Hat Hardened Images | RedHat | openssl-main-3.5.9-0.1.hum1 | * |
| Red Hat Hardened Images | RedHat | openssl3-main-3.5.9-0.1.hum1 | * |
| Nodejs | Ubuntu | esm-apps/jammy | * |
| Nodejs | Ubuntu | jammy | * |
| Openssl | Ubuntu | jammy | * |
| Openssl | Ubuntu | noble | * |
| Openssl | Ubuntu | resolute | * |
| Openssl | Ubuntu | upstream | * |
Potential Mitigations
References
- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/7588db7fef14209c3caa3a101d11a02006b19166
- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/7ca0ccb5172a577e9b87267d77bfe21e5481a5e7
- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/9eb2a8a9b86136cdb39d6d7d50644dd66941cdc3
- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/abf02872a4b71767ecc72293424420f5b009190f
- https://openssl-library.org/news/secadv/20260929.txt