OpenSSL Patches High-Severity Vulnerability Found With AI
OpenSSL released patches for 18 vulnerabilities, including a high-severity heap use-after-free flaw (CVE-2026-45447) in PKCS#7 signature verification. This vulnerability can be triggered by specially crafted PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages and may lead to heap corruption, crashes, or remote code execution. Additional moderate and low-severity flaws allow decryption, forgery, DoS, authentication bypass, and potential code execution. Some vulnerabilities were discovered with AI assistance. High-severity OpenSSL flaws are rare, making this patch critical.
AI Analysis
Technical Summary
OpenSSL patched 18 vulnerabilities in its latest releases, notably CVE-2026-45447, a high-severity heap use-after-free bug in the PKCS#7 verification function. This bug occurs when processing PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages with an empty ASN.1 SET in the SignedData digestAlgorithms field, causing OpenSSL to incorrectly free a caller-owned BIO during PKCS7_verify(). Subsequent use of this BIO by the application results in use-after-free, potentially leading to heap corruption, process crashes, or remote code execution. Other patched vulnerabilities include moderate-severity issues enabling decryption of encrypted communications, ciphertext forgery, DoS attacks, integrity bypass, and arbitrary code execution. One medium-severity flaw allows bypassing authentication by tricking systems into accepting attacker-controlled certificates with a 1-in-256 success rate. Low-severity bugs may cause crashes, message forgery, private key recovery, root CA replacement, or code execution. Several vulnerabilities were reported with AI assistance, indicating AI's growing role in vulnerability discovery. This is the second high-severity OpenSSL vulnerability patched in 2026.
Potential Impact
Exploitation of CVE-2026-45447 can cause heap corruption, application crashes, and potentially remote code execution when processing malicious PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages. Other vulnerabilities patched can lead to decryption of encrypted data, message forgery, denial of service, authentication bypass, and arbitrary code execution. The authentication bypass flaw allows attackers to impersonate legitimate certificates with a low probability but still notable success rate. These vulnerabilities collectively pose significant risks to confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems using affected OpenSSL versions.
Mitigation Recommendations
Apply the latest OpenSSL releases that include patches for these 18 vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-45447. Since this is a software vulnerability in OpenSSL libraries, upgrading to the fixed versions is the recommended and effective mitigation. Patch status is confirmed by the vendor's official releases. No additional vendor advisory indicates alternative mitigations or that no action is required.
OpenSSL Patches High-Severity Vulnerability Found With AI
Description
OpenSSL released patches for 18 vulnerabilities, including a high-severity heap use-after-free flaw (CVE-2026-45447) in PKCS#7 signature verification. This vulnerability can be triggered by specially crafted PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages and may lead to heap corruption, crashes, or remote code execution. Additional moderate and low-severity flaws allow decryption, forgery, DoS, authentication bypass, and potential code execution. Some vulnerabilities were discovered with AI assistance. High-severity OpenSSL flaws are rare, making this patch critical.
AI-Powered Analysis
Machine-generated threat intelligence
Technical Analysis
OpenSSL patched 18 vulnerabilities in its latest releases, notably CVE-2026-45447, a high-severity heap use-after-free bug in the PKCS#7 verification function. This bug occurs when processing PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages with an empty ASN.1 SET in the SignedData digestAlgorithms field, causing OpenSSL to incorrectly free a caller-owned BIO during PKCS7_verify(). Subsequent use of this BIO by the application results in use-after-free, potentially leading to heap corruption, process crashes, or remote code execution. Other patched vulnerabilities include moderate-severity issues enabling decryption of encrypted communications, ciphertext forgery, DoS attacks, integrity bypass, and arbitrary code execution. One medium-severity flaw allows bypassing authentication by tricking systems into accepting attacker-controlled certificates with a 1-in-256 success rate. Low-severity bugs may cause crashes, message forgery, private key recovery, root CA replacement, or code execution. Several vulnerabilities were reported with AI assistance, indicating AI's growing role in vulnerability discovery. This is the second high-severity OpenSSL vulnerability patched in 2026.
Potential Impact
Exploitation of CVE-2026-45447 can cause heap corruption, application crashes, and potentially remote code execution when processing malicious PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages. Other vulnerabilities patched can lead to decryption of encrypted data, message forgery, denial of service, authentication bypass, and arbitrary code execution. The authentication bypass flaw allows attackers to impersonate legitimate certificates with a low probability but still notable success rate. These vulnerabilities collectively pose significant risks to confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems using affected OpenSSL versions.
Mitigation Recommendations
Apply the latest OpenSSL releases that include patches for these 18 vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-45447. Since this is a software vulnerability in OpenSSL libraries, upgrading to the fixed versions is the recommended and effective mitigation. Patch status is confirmed by the vendor's official releases. No additional vendor advisory indicates alternative mitigations or that no action is required.
Technical Details
- Article Source
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Threat ID: 6a2845cb8dd33fbd855a074c
Added to database: 6/9/2026, 4:56:43 PM
Last enriched: 6/9/2026, 4:56:54 PM
Last updated: 6/9/2026, 4:57:08 PM
Views: 1
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