ASN1_TYPE Type Confusion in the PKCS7_digest_from_attributes() function

Issue summary: A type confusion vulnerability exists in the signature

verification of signed PKCS#7 data where an ASN1_TYPE union member is

accessed without first validating the type, causing an invalid or NULL

pointer dereference when processing malformed PKCS#7 data.

Impact summary: An application performing signature verification of PKCS#7

data or calling directly the PKCS7_digest_from_attributes() function can be

caused to dereference an invalid or NULL pointer when reading, resulting in

a Denial of Service.

The function PKCS7_digest_from_attributes() accesses the message digest attribute

value without validating its type. When the type is not V_ASN1_OCTET_STRING,

this results in accessing invalid memory through the ASN1_TYPE union, causing

a crash.

Exploiting this vulnerability requires an attacker to provide a malformed

signed PKCS#7 to an application that verifies it. The impact of the

exploit is just a Denial of Service, the PKCS7 API is legacy and applications

should be using the CMS API instead. For these reasons the issue was

assessed as Low severity.

The FIPS modules in 3.5, 3.4, 3.3 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue,

as the PKCS#7 parsing implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module

boundary.

OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are vulnerable to this issue.