What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-73502: kin-openapi openapi3filter: unauthenticated nil-pointer panic when validating a request against a `content` parameter whose media type has no schema

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-18 · updated 2026-10-22
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

kin-openapi is a Go project for handling OpenAPI files. From 0.2.0 until 0.144.0, openapi3filter.ValidateRequest can encounter a NULL-pointer-dereference denial of service when an operation declares a content parameter whose application/json media type has no schema. In openapi3filter/req_resp_decoder.go, the default defaultContentParameterDecoder dereferences mt.Schema.Value without checking whether mt.Schema is nil, even though doc.Validate() accepts the document under OpenAPI 3.0.x and 3.1.x. A single unauthenticated request supplying the parameter value can panic request validation, causing an aborted request with log growth in the common synchronous net/http path or a full process crash in integrations without recovery. This issue is fixed in version 0.144.0.

Affected products

• getkin kin-openapi: from 0.2.0, < 0.144.0

References

• https://github.com/getkin/kin-openapi/commit/68ac2affa325514d7d6e731204d6a1edf6bdff64
• https://github.com/getkin/kin-openapi/releases/tag/v0.144.0
• https://github.com/getkin/kin-openapi/security/advisories/GHSA-jpcw-4wr7-c3vq
• https://github.com/getkin/kin-openapi/security/advisories/GHSA-jpcw-4wr7-c3vq

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