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24Track

Client-Side Memory Leak in OCSP Response Checking

OpenSSL · CVE-2026-54876
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: 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 am

Evidence

No coverage recorded yet.

Exploitation

  • Public proof of concept
  • Exploited in the wild
  • Listed as known exploited
CVSS
7.5
EPSS
0.5%
First seen
11 h ago
Status
corroborated

All OpenSSL vulnerabilities