CVE-2026-45271

medium

Assigned by CNA: github_m

Published 2026-08-21 · Modified 2026-08-21

Discuss on Community Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

5.5

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

5.5

Description

Picotls is a TLS protocol library that allows users select different crypto backends based on their use case. Picotls implements its own ASN.1 validation helper, which is used by the minicrypto backend while parsing local PKCS#8 private keys. Prior to commit c14231d801407640bc42c2dcf92783409ea6a7c7, the validator recursively descends into constructed ASN.1 elements without enforcing a maximum nesting depth. If an application loads an attacker-supplied private-key file through ptls_minicrypto_load_private_key(), or otherwise calls the public ASN.1 validation API on untrusted DER, a crafted deeply nested ASN.1 structure can exhaust the process stack and crash the application. Note that the libcrypto (OpenSSL) backend does not use the ASN.1 validation helper of picotls, and therefore is immune to this vulnerability. The vulnerability has been addressed in commit c14231d801407640bc42c2dcf92783409ea6a7c7.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

55%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

CWEs

CWE-835

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.