CVE-2026-42766
MediumCVSS 5.9Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk43th percentile - higher than 43% of all known CVEs
Summary
A specially crafted password-encrypted CMS message can trigger a NULL pointer dereference during CMS decryption, leading to an application crash.
Risk Assessment
This NULL pointer dereference results in an application crash and can lead to a Denial of Service (DoS).
Recommendation
It is recommended to update OpenSSL to the latest version to mitigate issues related to this vulnerability.
Original NVD description (English source)
Issue summary: A specially crafted password-encrypted CMS message can trigger a NULL pointer dereference during CMS decryption. Impact summary: This NULL pointer dereference leads to an application crash and a Denial of Service. The CMS PasswordRecipientInfo.keyDerivationAlgorithm field is defined as OPTIONAL in the ASN.1 specification and may therefore be absent in specially crafted inputs. During the password-based CMS decryption the OpenSSL CMS implementation dereferences this field without first checking whether it was present. An attacker who supplies such a CMS message to an application performing password-based CMS decryption can trigger an application crash, leading to a Denial of Service. Applications that process password-encrypted CMS messages may be affected. The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.