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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 6.0 CVE-2026-55962 EUVD-2026-39575GHSA-gq94-hf88-g4wv

TLS 1.3 post-handshake authentication: server accepts Finished without client Certificate/CertificateVerify

Published Jun 25, 2026 · Updated Jun 26, 2026 · Assigned by wolfSSL

Description

TLS 1.3 post-handshake authentication (PHA) issue where a server could accept a client's Finished message without the client having sent a Certificate and CertificateVerify. The post-handshake-auth exemption that allows an empty/absent peer certificate was only intended for the initial handshake, but it was also being applied while a post-handshake CertificateRequest was still outstanding. The check is now scoped to the initial handshake only: on the server, once a post-handshake CertificateRequest has been sent (certReqCtx is set), a peer certificate and a valid CertificateVerify are required again before the Finished is accepted, with empty-certificate handling following the configured verify mode (FAIL_IF_NO_PEER_CERT) just as during first-handshake client authentication. Only affects TLS 1.3 servers built with post-handshake authentication support (WOLFSSL_POST_HANDSHAKE_AUTH / --enable-postauth, included in --enable-all) that enable WOLFSSL_VERIFY_POST_HANDSHAKE and request a client certificate after the handshake via wolfSSL_request_certificate(). Clients, and servers that do not use post-handshake authentication, are unaffected.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
wolfSSL wolfSSL 5.5.4 – ≤ 5.9.1 —

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 13 wolfssl 5.7.2-0.1+deb13u2 —
Debian 12 wolfssl 5.5.4-2+deb12u3 —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 wolfssl No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS wolfssl No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 wolfssl No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS wolfssl No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS wolfssl No fix yet —
Show 3 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS wolfssl No fix yet —
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS wolfssl No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS wolfssl No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Alpine v3.24 wolfssl 5.9.2-r0 —

References