CVE-2026-75805: openssl NULL Pointer Dereference

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-75805 is a medium (CVSS 5.3) NULL Pointer Dereference vulnerability in openssl. EPSS estimates a 0.22% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 11.9% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 29-09-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 29-09-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Issue summary: A CMP client that requests certificate revocation on the basis of a PKCS#10 CSR may dereference a NULL pointer and terminate abnormally when processing a crafted revocation response. Impact summary: The NULL pointer dereference happens on a read which leads to a crash and a Denial of Service for the affected client application. CWE: CWE-476: NULL-pointer dereference Description: A CMP client revoking a certificate has to tell the server which certificate to revoke, and may do so by supplying a PKCS#10 CSR instead of the certificate itself or its issuer name and serial number. This is 'openssl cmp -cmd rr -csr <file>' on the command line, or OSSL_CMP_exec_RR_ses() with the certificate supplied via OSSL_CMP_CTX_set1_p10CSR() through the API. A CSR does not contain the issuer name and serial number of the certificate, so the client does not send them. A server may optionally name the certificate it revoked in its response, and the client then compares that name against what it sent. Having sent neither an issuer name nor a serial number, it has nothing to compare against, and a server returning a specially crafted name causes the client to read from a NULL pointer and crash. The revocation response is checked for valid message protection before the affected code is reached, so an attacker must be a malicious or compromised CMP server, or a man-in-the-middle in possession of the secret used for message protection. Clients that identify the certificate to be revoked by a certificate or by issuer and serial number rather than by a PKCS#10 CSR are not affected. FIPS impact: no No FIPS modules are affected by this issue, as the CMP protocol implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

• CWE-476NULL Pointer DereferenceThe product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.