Skip to content
OpenAdvisories
Medium · 5.9 CVE-2025-66199 EUVD-2025-206398GHSA-5888-36j9-c92p

TLS 1.3 CompressedCertificate excessive memory allocation

Published Jan 27, 2026 · Updated Jan 29, 2026 · Assigned by openssl

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.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
OpenSSL OpenSSL 3.6.0 – < 3.6.1, 3.5.0 – < 3.5.5, 3.4.0 – < 3.4.4, 3.3.0 – < 3.3.6 3.6.1

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 openssl 3.5.5-1 —
Debian 13 openssl 3.5.4-1~deb13u2 —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 edk2 +1 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS edk2 +1 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS openssl 3.5.5-1ubuntu1 —
Ubuntu 25.10 edk2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 openssl 3.5.3-1ubuntu3 USN-7980-1
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS edk2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS openssl 3.0.13-0ubuntu3.7 USN-7980-1
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS openssl 3.0.2-0ubuntu1.21 USN-7980-1
Show 3 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS nodejs No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS nodejs No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS nodejs No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
RHEL 10 openssl +3 1:3.5.1-7.el10_1 RHSA-2026:1472
RHEL 9 openssl +3 1:3.5.1-7.el9_7 RHSA-2026:1473
Show 1 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Red Hat Hardened Images 1 openssl +5 3.5.6-0.1.hum1 RHSA-2026:7261

AlmaLinux

Errata ↗
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
AlmaLinux 10 openssl +3 1:3.5.1-7.el10_1.alma.1 ALSA-2026:1472
AlmaLinux 9 openssl +3 1:3.5.1-7.el9_7 ALSA-2026:1473

Rocky Linux

Errata ↗
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Rocky Linux 10 openssl 1:3.5.1-7.el10_1 RLSA-2026:1472
Rocky Linux 9 openssl 1:3.5.1-7.el9_7 RLSA-2026:1473
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
SLES for SAP 16.0 openssl-3 3.5.0-160000.5.1 SUSE-SU-2026:20223-1
SLES 16.0 openssl-3 3.5.0-160000.5.1 SUSE-SU-2026:20223-1
SLE Micro 6.2 openssl-3 3.5.0-160000.5.1 SUSE-SU-2026:20211-1
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Tumbleweed openssl-3 3.5.3-2.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:10237-1
openSUSE Leap 16.0 openssl-3 3.5.0-160000.5.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:20152-1
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Alpine v3.24 openssl 3.5.5-r0 —
Alpine v3.23 openssl 3.5.5-r0 —
Alpine v3.22 openssl 3.5.5-r0 —
Alpine v3.21 openssl 3.3.6-r0 —
Alpine v3.20 openssl 3.3.6-r0 —

Amazon Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Amazon Linux 2023 openssl +5 1:3.2.2-1.amzn2023.0.5 ALAS2023-2026-1434

Azure Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Azure Linux 3 openssl 3.3.5-3 —

Oracle Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Oracle Linux 10 openssl +3 1:3.5.1-7.0.1.el10_1 ELSA-2026-1472
Oracle Linux 9 openssl +3 1:3.5.1-7.0.1.el9_7 ELSA-2026-50075, ELSA-2026-1473

Wolfi

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Wolfi rolling openssl 3.6.1-r0 —

Advisories 19

References