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CVE-2025-66199 Detail

Description

Issue summary: A TLS 1.3 connection using certificate compression can be forced to allocate a large buffer before decompression without checking against the configured certificate size limit. Impact summary: An attacker can cause per-connection memory allocations of up to approximately 22 MiB and extra CPU work, potentially leading to service degradation or resource exhaustion (Denial of Service). In affected configurations, the peer-supplied uncompressed certificate length from a CompressedCertificate message is used to grow a heap buffer prior to decompression. This length is not bounded by the max_cert_list setting, which otherwise constrains certificate message sizes. An attacker can exploit this to cause large per-connection allocations followed by handshake failure. No memory corruption or information disclosure occurs. This issue only affects builds where TLS 1.3 certificate compression is compiled in (i.e., not OPENSSL_NO_COMP_ALG) and at least one compression algorithm (brotli, zlib, or zstd) is available, and where the compression extension is negotiated. Both clients receiving a server CompressedCertificate and servers in mutual TLS scenarios receiving a client CompressedCertificate are affected. Servers that do not request client certificates are not vulnerable to client-initiated attacks. Users can mitigate this issue by setting SSL_OP_NO_RX_CERTIFICATE_COMPRESSION to disable receiving compressed certificates. The FIPS modules in 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.3 are not affected by this issue, as the TLS implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary. OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.3 are vulnerable to this issue. OpenSSL 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are not affected by this issue.


Metrics

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CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

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URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/3ed1f75249932b155eef993a8e66a99cb98bfef4 OpenSSL Software Foundation
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/6184a4fb08ee6d7bca570d931a4e8bef40b64451 OpenSSL Software Foundation
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/895150b5e021d16b52fb32b97e1dd12f20448be5 OpenSSL Software Foundation
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/966a2478046c311ed7dae50c457d0db4cafbf7e4 OpenSSL Software Foundation
https://openssl-library.org/news/secadv/20260127.txt OpenSSL Software Foundation

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source
CWE-789 Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value OpenSSL Software Foundation  

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2025-66199
NVD Published Date:
01/27/2026
NVD Last Modified:
01/27/2026
Source:
OpenSSL Software Foundation