What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-97394: kin-openapi: Nil-pointer dereference panic in openapi3filter for OpenAPI 3.1 array schemas missing items

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-10-15 · updated 2026-10-20
• Weakness: CWE-248

Description

kin-openapi is a Go project for handling OpenAPI files. From 0.136.0 until 0.143.0, openapi3filter accepts OpenAPI 3.1 array schemas without an items keyword and then dereferences the nil Schema.Items value while decoding application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data request bodies, response headers, and other array parameter surfaces. A remote unauthenticated client can reach an affected operation with a nonempty request or matching response and deterministically trigger a nil-pointer panic during ValidateRequest or ValidateResponse. OpenAPI 3.0 documents are not affected because document validation rejects arrays without items, and JSON request bodies use a different decoder path. This issue is fixed in version 0.143.0.

Affected products

• getkin kin-openapi: from 0.136.0, < 0.143.0

References

• https://github.com/getkin/kin-openapi/commit/30e292371a89ca6d1f91a9553e0aa518b49f838d
• https://github.com/getkin/kin-openapi/releases/tag/v0.143.0
• https://github.com/getkin/kin-openapi/security/advisories/GHSA-p6wj-qrr4-pgh5
• https://github.com/opnsense/core/security/advisories/GHSA-26cj-h9rj-g5pf

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