CVE-2024-0727: PKCS12 Decoding crashes

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 3.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2024-01-26 · updated 2026-10-15
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

Issue summary: Processing a maliciously formatted PKCS12 file may lead OpenSSL to crash leading to a potential Denial of Service attack Impact summary: Applications loading files in the PKCS12 format from untrusted sources might terminate abruptly. A file in PKCS12 format can contain certificates and keys and may come from an untrusted source. The PKCS12 specification allows certain fields to be NULL, but OpenSSL does not correctly check for this case. This can lead to a NULL pointer dereference that results in OpenSSL crashing. If an application processes PKCS12 files from an untrusted source using the OpenSSL APIs then that application will be vulnerable to this issue. OpenSSL APIs that are vulnerable to this are: PKCS12_parse(), PKCS12_unpack_p7data(), PKCS12_unpack_p7encdata(), PKCS12_unpack_authsafes() and PKCS12_newpass(). We have also fixed a similar issue in SMIME_write_PKCS7(). However since this function is related to writing data we do not consider it security significant. The FIPS modules in 3.2, 3.1 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue.

Affected products

OpenSSL: from 1.0.2 before 1.0.2zj; from 1.1.1 before 1.1.1x; from 3.0.0 before 3.0.13; from 3.1.0 before 3.1.5; 3.2.0 — fixed in 1.0.2zj, 1.1.1x, 3.0.13, 3.1.5
Pypi Cryptography: before 42.0.2; 0.1, 0.2, 0.2.1, 0.2.2, 0.3, 0.4 (+117) — fixed in 42.0.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: OpenSSL 1.0.2zj, 1.1.1x, 3.0.13, 3.1.5; Pypi Cryptography 42.0.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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