CVE-2026-5263

Published Apr 9, 2026

Last updated 2 months ago

Overview

Description
URI nameConstraints from constrained intermediate CAs are parsed but not enforced during certificate chain verification in wolfcrypt/src/asn.c. A compromised or malicious sub-CA could issue leaf certificates with URI SAN entries that violate the nameConstraints of the issuing CA, and wolfSSL would accept them as valid.
Source
facts@wolfssl.com
NVD status
Analyzed
Products
wolfssl

Risk scores

CVSS 4.0

Type
Secondary
Base score
7
Impact score
-
Exploitability score
-
Vector string
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:H/UI:N/VC:H/VI:L/VA:N/SC:H/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X
Severity
HIGH

CVSS 3.1

Type
Primary
Base score
6.5
Impact score
5.2
Exploitability score
1.2
Vector string
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
Severity
MEDIUM

Weaknesses

facts@wolfssl.com
CWE-295

Social media

Hype score
Not currently trending

Configurations

  1. Issue summary: The implementations of AES-SIV (RFC 5297) and AES-GCM-SIV (RFC 8452) mishandle the authentication of AAD (Additional Authenticated Data) with an empty ciphertext allowing a forgery of such messages. Impact summary: An attacker can forge empty messages with arbitrary AAD to the victim's application using these ciphers. AES-SIV (RFC 5297) and AES-GCM-SIV (RFC 8452) are nonce-misuse-resistant AEAD modes: they accept a key, nonce, optional AAD (bytes that are authenticated but not encrypted), and plaintext, and produces ciphertext plus a 16-byte tag. On decrypt, `EVP_DecryptFinal_ex()` is documented to return success only if the tag is verified succesfully. In OpenSSL's provider implementation of these ciphers, the expected tag is computed only when decryption function is invoked with non-empty data. If the caller supplies AAD and then calls `EVP_DecryptFinal_ex()` without invocation of the ciphertext update, which can happen when the received ciphertext length is zero, the tag is never recalculated and still holds its all-zeros value. When AES-GCM-SIV is used, an attacker who sends arbitrary AAD, empty ciphertext, and all-zeros tag passes authentication under any key they do not know, single-shot. When AES-SIV is used, for mounting the attack it's necessary for the application to reuse the decryption context without resetting the key. AES-SIV is implemented since OpenSSL 3.0. AES-GCM-SIV is implemented since OpenSSL 3.2. No protocols implemented in OpenSSL itself (TLS/CMS/PKCS7/HPKE/QUIC) support either AES-GCM-SIV or AES-SIV. To mount an attack, the applications must implement their own protocol and use the EVP interface. Also they must skip the ciphertext update when a message with an empty ciphertext arrives. The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as these algorithms are not FIPS approved and the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.CVE-2026-45446
  2. Issue summary: When an application drives an AES-OCB context through the public EVP_Cipher() one-shot interface, the application-supplied initialisation vector (IV) is silently discarded. Impact summary: Every message encrypted under the same key uses the same effective nonce regardless of the IV supplied by the caller, resulting in (key, nonce) reuse and loss of confidentiality. If the same code path is used to compute the authentication tag, the tag depends only on the (key, IV) pair and not on the plaintext or ciphertext, allowing universal forgery of arbitrary ciphertext from a single captured message. OpenSSL provides two ways to drive a cipher: the documented streaming interface (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) and a lower-level one-shot, EVP_Cipher(), whose documentation explicitly recommends against use by applications in favour of EVP_CipherUpdate() and EVP_CipherFinal_ex(). The OCB provider's streaming handler flushes the application-supplied IV into the OCB context before processing data; the one-shot handler did not. Every call to EVP_Cipher() on an AES-OCB context therefore ran with the all-zero key-derived offset state left by cipher initialisation, regardless of the caller's IV. If EVP_EncryptFinal_ex() is subsequently used to obtain the authentication tag, the deferred IV setup runs at that point and clears the running checksum that should have been accumulated over the plaintext. The resulting tag is a function of (key, IV) only and verifies against any ciphertext produced under the same (key, IV) pair. The OpenSSL SSL/TLS implementation is not affected: AES-OCB is not a TLS cipher suite, and libssl does not call EVP_Cipher() in any case. Applications that drive AES-OCB through the documented streaming AEAD API (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) are not affected. Only applications that combine the AES-OCB cipher with the EVP_Cipher() one-shot API are vulnerable. The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as AES-OCB is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.CVE-2026-45445
  3. Issue Summary: An error in the callback used to verify the certificate provided in a Root CA key update Certificate Management Protocol (CMP) message response rendered the certificate validation ineffectual, which could lead to escalation of credentials from the Registration Authority (RA) level to the root Certification Authority (root CA) level. Impact Summary: The Registration Autority could replace the root CA certificate for the CMP clients with an arbitrary root CA certificate. One of the parts of the Certificate Management Protocol (CMP), specified in RFC 9810, is Root Certification Authority (root CA) key Rollover, which is sent by the server in a message with type 'id-it-rootCaKeyUpdate'. As part of these messages, 'newWithOld' certificate, the new root CA certificate signed with the old root CA key, is provided, and verifying its signature is crucial for transferring the trust from the old CA key to the new one. The 'id-it-rootCaKeyUpdate' messages are expected to be processed with OSSL_CMP_get1_rootCaKeyUpdate(), that is expected to verify the 'newWithOld' certificate. A typo in the certificate chain building code led to adding an incorrect certificate ('newWithOld' instead of 'oldRoot') to the certificate chain, rendering the certificate verification process ineffectual (only the issuer name and the algorithm OIDs were verified by other parts of the verification code). An attacker who already has credentials that satisfy the CMP message protection checks can generate a new key pair and use a crafted self-signed certificate in its 'id-it-rootCaKeyUpdate' CMP messages which affected CMP clients would accept as a new trust anchor. Significant preconditions for the attack (having valid RA-level credentials) are the reason the issue was assigned Low severity. The FIPS modules are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.CVE-2026-42769
  4. Issue summary: When EVP_PKEY_derive_set_peer() is called with a DHX (X9.42) peer key, the peer key is not properly checked for the subgroup membership. Impact summary: A malicious peer which presents an X9.42 key carrying the victim's p and g parameters, a forged q = r (a small prime factor of the cofactor (p−1)/q_local), and a public value Y of order r can recover the victim's private key after a small number of key exchange attempts. When EVP_PKEY_derive_set_peer() is called with a DHX (X9.42) peer key, the subgroup membership check Y^q ≡ 1 (mod p) is performed using the peer's own q parameter, not the local key's q. The peer's domain parameters are then matched against the domain parameters of the private key, but the value of q is not compared. A malicious peer who presents an X9.42 key carrying the victim's p, g, a forged q = r (a small prime factor of the cofactor), and a public value Y of order r passes all checks. The shared secret then takes only r distinct values, leaking priv mod r. Repeating for each small-prime factor of the cofactor and combining via CRT recovers the full private key (Lim–Lee / small-subgroup-confinement attack). The realistic attack surface is narrow: principally CMP deployments with long-lived RA/CA DHX keys and bespoke enterprise or government applications using X9.42 DHX static keys with interactive protocols and therefore this issue was assigned Low severity. The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are affected by this issue.CVE-2026-42770

References

Sources include official advisories and independent security research.