Issue summary: A CMP client that requests certificate revocation on the basis of a PKCS#10 CSR may dereference a NULL pointer and terminate abnormally when processing a crafted revocation response.
Impact summary: The NULL pointer dereference happens on a read which leads to a crash and a Denial of Service for the affected client application.
CWE: CWE-476: NULL-pointer dereference
Description: A CMP client revoking a certificate has to tell the server which certificate to revoke, and may do so by supplying a PKCS#10 CSR instead of the certificate itself or its issuer name and serial number. This is 'openssl cmp -cmd rr -csr <file>' on the command line, or OSSL_CMP_exec_RR_ses() with the certificate supplied via OSSL_CMP_CTX_set1_p10CSR() through the API.
A CSR does not contain the issuer name and serial number of the certificate, so the client does not send them. A server may optionally name the certificate it revoked in its response, and the client then compares that name against what it sent. Having sent neither an issuer name nor a serial number, it has nothing to compare against, and a server returning a specially crafted name causes the client to read from a NULL pointer and crash.
The revocation response is checked for valid message protection before the affected code is reached, so an attacker must be a malicious or compromised CMP server, or a man-in-the-middle in possession of the secret used for message protection. Clients that identify the certificate to be revoked by a certificate or by issuer and serial number rather than by a PKCS#10 CSR are not affected.
FIPS impact: no No FIPS modules are affected by this issue, as the CMP protocol implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.
| Software | Affected versions |
|---|---|
| openssl / openssl | >= 3.0.0, < 3.0.23 |
| openssl / openssl | >= 3.4.0, < 3.4.8 |
| openssl / openssl | >= 3.5.0, < 3.5.9 |
| openssl / openssl | >= 3.6.0, < 3.6.5 |
| openssl / openssl | >= 4.0.0, < 4.0.3 |
A vulnerability database tells you what is broken. Attack surface management tells you where it is running: it discovers your internet-facing assets and flags the ones affected by issues like this one.
What is attack surface management? →A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.
A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.
Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.
Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.
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