OpenSSL up to 4.0.2 use after free

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, was found in OpenSSL up to 4.0.2. Affected by this issue is some unknown functionality. Such manipulation leads to use after free. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-84783. The attack may be launched remotely. There is no exploit available. You should upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in OpenSSL up to 4.0.2. It has been rated as critical. Affected by this issue is some unknown functionality. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a use after free vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-416. Referencing memory after it has been freed can cause a program to crash, use unexpected values, or execute code. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

Issue summary: The first concurrent use of the same X.509 certificate by several threads may cause its cached extension data to be freed while another thread is still using it. Impact summary: A remote, unauthenticated peer could crash a multi-threaded TLS client, or a multi-threaded TLS server that requests client certificates, if the first certificate chains built to the same trusted CA certificate are built by several connections at the same time. This is a use-after-free read, which is likely to crash the process, resulting in a Denial of Service. CWE: CWE-416: Use After Free Description: OpenSSL caches the decoded values of a certificate's X.509v3 extensions inside the X509 object the first time they are needed. In OpenSSL 4.0 this cache is built in two phases: the extension values are computed while holding a read lock on the certificate, and the results are then installed into the certificate under a write lock. Because a read lock does not exclude other readers, several threads can compute the cache for the same certificate at the same time. Each thread that subsequently acquires the write lock installs its own results and frees the values installed by the thread before it, even though that earlier thread has already marked the cache as complete and may have returned pointers into it to its caller. A caller still using those pointers then reads freed memory. Any certificate shared between threads is exposed the first time its extensions are decoded. In TLS the certificates at risk are the trusted CA certificates supplied for chain verification, by whatever means, since these are shared by every connection and their extensions are decoded and cached the first time a chain is built to them. Certificates sent by the peer are decoded separately for each connection and are not shared, so they are not affected. In a TLS client verifying server certificates, or a TLS server that requests and verifies client certificates, the use-after-free could only occur if the first chains built to the same trusted CA are built by several connections at the same time. FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as X.509 certificate handling is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary. OpenSSL 4.0 is vulnerable to this issue. OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are not affected by this issue. OpenSSL 4.0 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 4.0.3. This issue was reported on 27 August 2026 by Tim Becker (Xint.io) and independently in a public report on 31 August 2026 by aydinmercan. The fix has been developed by Bob Beck. -- cut (non-publishing metadata for internal use) -- Reported by: Tim Becker (Xint.io), aydinmercan Fixed by: Bob Beck

The advisory is available at openssl-library.org. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2026-84783 since 09/02/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be launched remotely. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not available. The structure of the vulnerability defines a possible price range of USD $5k-$25k at the moment (estimation calculated on 09/29/2026).

Upgrading to version 4.0.3 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Type

• Network Encryption Software

Name

• OpenSSL

Version

• 4.0.0
• 4.0.1
• 4.0.2

License

• open-source

Website

• Product: https://www.openssl.org/

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