CVE-2026-84783

Issue summary: The first concurrent use of the same X.509 certificate by

several threads may cause its cached extension data to be freed while

another thread is still using it.

Impact summary: A remote, unauthenticated peer could crash a multi-threaded

TLS client, or a multi-threaded TLS server that requests client

certificates, if the first certificate chains built to the same trusted CA

certificate are built by several connections at the same time. This is a

use-after-free read, which is likely to crash the process, resulting in a

Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-416: Use After Free

Description: OpenSSL caches the decoded values of a certificate's X.509v3

extensions inside the X509 object the first time they are needed. In

OpenSSL 4.0 this cache is built in two phases: the extension values are

computed while holding a read lock on the certificate, and the results are

then installed into the certificate under a write lock. Because a read lock

does not exclude other readers, several threads can compute the cache for

the same certificate at the same time. Each thread that subsequently

acquires the write lock installs its own results and frees the values

installed by the thread before it, even though that earlier thread has

already marked the cache as complete and may have returned pointers into it

to its caller. A caller still using those pointers then reads freed memory.

Any certificate shared between threads is exposed the first time its

extensions are decoded. In TLS the certificates at risk are the trusted CA

certificates supplied for chain verification, by whatever means, since these

are shared by every connection and their extensions are decoded and cached

the first time a chain is built to them. Certificates sent by the peer are

decoded separately for each connection and are not shared, so they are not

affected. In a TLS client verifying server certificates, or a TLS server

that requests and verifies client certificates, the use-after-free could

only occur if the first chains built to the same trusted CA are built by

several connections at the same time.

FIPS impact: no

The FIPS module is not affected as X.509 certificate handling is outside

of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

OpenSSL 4.0 is vulnerable to this issue.

OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are not affected by this issue.

OpenSSL 4.0 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 4.0.3.

This issue was reported on 27 August 2026 by Tim Becker (Xint.io) and

independently in a public report on 31 August 2026 by aydinmercan.

The fix has been developed by Bob Beck.

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Reported by: Tim Becker (Xint.io), aydinmercan

Fixed by: Bob Beck