CVE-2026-5501CWE-295

Improper Certificate Signature Verification in X.509 Chain Validation Allows Forged Leaf Certificates

High · published April 10, 2026

CVSS v4.0
8.6
EPSS
0%
Percentile
11.7
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

wolfSSL_X509_verify_cert in the OpenSSL compatibility layer accepts a certificate chain in which the leaf's signature is not checked, if the attacker supplies an untrusted intermediate with Basic Constraints `CA:FALSE` that is legitimately signed by a trusted root. An attacker who obtains any leaf certificate from a trusted CA (e.g. a free DV cert from Let's Encrypt) can forge a certificate for any subject name with any public key and arbitrary signature bytes, and the function returns `WOLFSSL_SUCCESS` / `X509_V_OK`. The native wolfSSL TLS handshake path (`ProcessPeerCerts`) is not susceptible and the issue is limited to applications using the OpenSSL compatibility API directly, which would include integrations of wolfSSL into nginx and haproxy.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v4.0
8.6 · HIGH
Vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
EPSS
0.00219 · 11.7th percentile
Weakness
CWE-295 · Improper Certificate Validation
Published
2026-04-10T03:07Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 10 APR 03:07Z
    Improper Certificate Signature Verification in X.509 Chain Validation Allows Forged Leaf Certificates
    cvelistv5