CVE-2026-45447
HighCVSS 8.8Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
High risk84th percentile - higher than 84% of all known CVEs
Summary
A specially crafted PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message can trigger a use-after-free during signature verification in OpenSSL. The flaw occurs when the digestAlgorithms field is an empty ASN.1 SET, causing incorrect freeing of a caller-owned BIO.
Risk Assessment
This vulnerability may lead to process crashes, heap corruption, or potentially remote code execution. Organizations processing PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages are at risk.
Recommendation
Immediately update OpenSSL to the patched version. If not possible, restrict processing of untrusted PKCS#7/S/MIME messages or use the CMS API, which is not affected.
Original NVD description (English source)
Issue summary: A specially crafted PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message could trigger a use-after-free during PKCS#7 signature verification. Impact summary: A use-after-free may result in process crashes, heap corruption, or potentially remote code execution. When processing a PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message, if the SignedData digestAlgorithms field is present as an empty ASN.1 SET, OpenSSL may incorrectly free a caller-owned BIO during PKCS7_verify(). A subsequent use of the BIO by the calling application results in a use-after-free condition. In the common case this occurs when the application later calls BIO_free() on the BIO originally passed to PKCS7_verify(). Depending on allocator behavior and application-specific BIO usage patterns, this may result in a crash or other memory corruption. In some application contexts this may potentially be exploitable for remote code execution. Applications that process PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages using OpenSSL PKCS#7 APIs may be affected. Applications using the CMS APIs for this processing are not 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.