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Excessive Memory Use Buffering DTLS Records for a Future Epoch

OpenSSL · CVE-2026-54874
0 news outlets0 CERTs and agencies0 researchers

Assessment: Track

SSVC decision points: exploitation none, automatable yes, technical impact partial, deployment high.

What is it?

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 epoc

Evidence

No coverage recorded yet.

Exploitation

  • Public proof of concept
  • Exploited in the wild
  • Listed as known exploited
CVSS
7.5
EPSS
0.6%
First seen
2 d ago
Status
corroborated

All OpenSSL vulnerabilities