CVE-2023-0466: Certificate policy check not enabled

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-03-28 · updated 2026-10-14
Weakness: CWE-295

Description

The function X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy() is documented to implicitly enable the certificate policy check when doing certificate verification. However the implementation of the function does not enable the check which allows certificates with invalid or incorrect policies to pass the certificate verification. As suddenly enabling the policy check could break existing deployments it was decided to keep the existing behavior of the X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy() function. Instead the applications that require OpenSSL to perform certificate policy check need to use X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies() or explicitly enable the policy check by calling X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set_flags() with the X509_V_FLAG_POLICY_CHECK flag argument. Certificate policy checks are disabled by default in OpenSSL and are not commonly used by applications.

Affected products

OpenSSL: from 1.0.2 before 1.0.2zh; from 1.1.1 before 1.1.1u; from 3.0.0 before 3.0.9; from 3.1.0 before 3.1.1 — fixed in 1.0.2zh, 1.1.1u, 3.0.9, 3.1.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: OpenSSL 1.0.2zh, 1.1.1u, 3.0.9, 3.1.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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