A denial of service flaw was found in OpenSSL 0.9.8, 1.0.1, 1.0.2 through 1.0.2h, and 1.1.0 in the way the TLS/SSL protocol defined processing of ALERT packets during a connection handshake. A remote attacker could use this flaw to make a TLS/SSL server consume an excessive amount of CPU and fail to accept connections from other clients.

The TLS protocol 1.2 and earlier supports the rsa_fixed_dh, dss_fixed_dh, rsa_fixed_ecdh, and ecdsa_fixed_ecdh values for ClientCertificateType but does not directly document the ability to compute the master secret in certain situations with a client secret key and server public key but not a server secret key, which makes it easier for man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof TLS servers by leveraging knowledge of the secret key for an arbitrary installed client X.509 certificate, aka the "Key Compromise Impersonation (KCI)" issue.