CVE-2025-66199
January 27, 2026
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 Packages
https://github.com/openssl/openssl.git (GITHUB):
Affected version(s) >=openssl-3.3.0 <openssl-3.3.6Fix Suggestion:
Update to version openssl-3.3.6https://github.com/openssl/openssl.git (GITHUB):
Affected version(s) >=openssl-3.4.0 <openssl-3.4.4Fix Suggestion:
Update to version openssl-3.4.4https://github.com/openssl/openssl.git (GITHUB):
Affected version(s) =openssl-3.6.0 <openssl-3.6.1Fix Suggestion:
Update to version openssl-3.6.1https://github.com/openssl/openssl.git (GITHUB):
Affected version(s) >=openssl-3.5.0 <openssl-3.5.5Fix Suggestion:
Update to version openssl-3.5.5Related ResourcesĀ (5)
Do you need more information?
Contact UsCVSS v4
Base Score:
8.2
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
HIGH
Attack Requirements
NONE
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Vulnerable System Confidentiality
NONE
Vulnerable System Integrity
NONE
Vulnerable System Availability
HIGH
Subsequent System Confidentiality
NONE
Subsequent System Integrity
NONE
Subsequent System Availability
NONE
CVSS v3
Base Score:
5.9
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
HIGH
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
HIGH
Weakness Type (CWE)
Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value
EPSS
Base Score:
0.06