CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-22795 — Issue summary: An invalid or NULL pointer dereference can happen in an application processing a malformed PKCS#12 file

Medium CVSS 5.5

Issue summary: An invalid or NULL pointer dereference can happen in an application processing a malformed PKCS#12 file. Impact summary: An application processing a malformed PKCS#12 file can be caused to dereference an invalid or NULL pointer on memory read, resulting in a Denial of Service. A type confusion vulnerability exists in PKCS#12 parsing code where an ASN1_TYPE union member is accessed without first validating the type, causing an invalid pointer read. The location is constrained to a 1-byte address space, meaning any attempted pointer manipulation can only target addresses between 0x00 and 0xFF. This range corresponds to the zero page, which is unmapped on most modern operating systems and will reliably result in a crash, leading only to a Denial of Service. Exploiting this issue also requires a user or application to process a maliciously crafted PKCS#12 file. It is uncommon to accept untrusted PKCS#12 files in applications as they are usually used to store private keys which are trusted by definition. 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 PKCS12 implementation is outs…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-01-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-754

Affected products

  • openssl / openssl

Showing 1 representative product identities from 6 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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