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Standard
Vulnerability Identifier

CVE-2025-66199

2026-01-27
Severity Assessment
5.9
MEDIUM
CVSS v3.x Score
Clinical Analysis (Description)

Issue summary: A TLS 1.3 connection using certificate compression can be
forced to allocate a large buffer before decompression without checking
against the configured certificate size limit.

Impact summary: An attacker can cause per-connection memory allocations of
up to approximately 22 MiB and extra CPU work, potentially leading to
service degradation or resource exhaustion (Denial of Service).

In affected configurations, the peer-supplied uncompressed certificate
length from a CompressedCertificate message is used to grow a heap buffer
prior to decompression. This length is not bounded by the max_cert_list
setting, which otherwise constrains certificate message sizes. An attacker
can exploit this to cause large per-connection allocations followed by
handshake failure. No memory corruption or information disclosure occurs.

This issue only affects builds where TLS 1.3 certificate compression is
compiled in (i.e., not OPENSSL_NO_COMP_ALG) and at least one compression
algorithm (brotli, zlib, or zstd) is available, and where the compression
extension is negotiated. Both clients receiving a server CompressedCertificate
and servers in mutual TLS scenarios receiving a client CompressedCertificate
are affected. Servers that do not request client certificates are not
vulnerable to client-initiated attacks.

Users can mitigate this issue by setting SSL_OP_NO_RX_CERTIFICATE_COMPRESSION
to disable receiving compressed certificates.

The FIPS modules in 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.3 are not affected by this issue,
as the TLS implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.3 are vulnerable to this issue.

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

Vector Sequencing

Attack Parameters

Attack Vector
Network
Attack Complexity
High
Privileges Required
None
User Interaction
None
Impact Consequences

Technical Impact

Unchanged
Scope
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Weakness Classification

CWE-CWE-789

Affected Population

Affected Configurations

Total: 4 detected entries

Software List Scrollable
op
openssl
Vendor: openssl • v3.3.2
op
openssl
Vendor: openssl • v3.5.0
op
openssl
Vendor: openssl • v3.3.1
op
openssl
Vendor: openssl • v3.3.0
Timeline

Time Line

PUBLICATION
27 Jan 2026
MODIFICATION
02 Feb 2026
FIRST PATCH
02 Feb 2026
Impact Statistics

Key Metrics

CVSS Score
5.9
MEDIUM
Products
4
Affected
Patches
4
Available
Remediation Protocol

Recommended Solution

No automatic solution found. Check vendor references.
Recommended Actions for Administrators

Immediate Action Plan

1. Inventory

Identify all affected systems in your infrastructure.

2. Assessment

Assess exposure and criticality for your organization.

3. Mitigation

Apply patches or available workarounds.

4. Verification

Test and confirm effectiveness of applied measures.