What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-3996: X.509 Policy Constraints Double Locking

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2022-12-13 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-667

Description

If an X.509 certificate contains a malformed policy constraint and policy processing is enabled, then a write lock will be taken twice recursively. On some operating systems (most widely: Windows) this results in a denial of service when the affected process hangs. Policy processing being enabled on a publicly facing server is not considered to be a common setup. Policy processing is enabled by passing the `-policy' argument to the command line utilities or by calling the `X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies()' function. Update (31 March 2023): The description of the policy processing enablement was corrected based on CVE-2023-0466.

Affected products

• OpenSSL: from 3.0.0 through 3.0.7

References

• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/7725e7bfe6f2ce8146b6552b44e0d226be7638e7
• https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20221213.txt
• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/7725e7bfe6f2ce8146b6552b44e0d226be7638e7
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20230203-0003/
• https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20221213.txt

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