CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-22796 — Openssl Openssl security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.3

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 outsid…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (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 7 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Cryptography, certificate, signature, and channel validation

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Check exposure

  • Inventory affected algorithms, key uses, trust stores, certificate validation settings, random sources, and plaintext channels across clients and services.
  • Determine which secrets, identities, signatures, or data protections depend on the affected primitive or validation path.
  • Check debug, compatibility, fallback, and hostname or audience override settings in build and runtime configuration.

Remediate safely

  • Use a maintained platform cryptographic API with approved algorithms, modes, parameters, randomness, and full peer identity validation.
  • Remove insecure fallback and validation bypasses; separate keys by purpose and load them from managed secret storage.
  • Plan rotation or reissuance for affected keys, certificates, tokens, hashes, or ciphertext and document compatibility sequencing.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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