CVE-2026-45447
EPSS 1.4%Vendor patched urgently, credible RCE pathway, but no KEV, PoC, or confirmed exploitation yet.
What: Heap use-after-free in OpenSSL's PKCS#7/S/MIME signature verification (PKCS7_verify) triggered by malformed SignedData with empty digestAlgorithms; affects process stability and potentially enables remote code execution.
Why it matters: OpenSSL patched this alongside 17 other vulnerabilities on 2026-06-09; described as high-severity by vendor and journalists. No KEV listing or public PoC yet, but immediate patch availability and mainstream security media coverage signal real impact. S/MIME processing is widespread in mail and document workflows.
Where it's seen: Vendor advisory links, SecurityWeek coverage, Lobsters discussion, trending CVE aggregators. Heavy emphasis on patch availability rather than exploitation proof.
RISK: HIGH — Use-after-free in widely-deployed cryptography library with RCE potential in some application contexts.
Description
Issue summary: A specially crafted PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message could trigger a use-after-free during PKCS#7 signature verification. Impact summary: A use-after-free may result in process crashes, heap corruption, or potentially remote code execution. When processing a PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed message, if the SignedData digestAlgorithms field is present as an empty ASN.1 SET, OpenSSL may incorrectly free a caller-owned BIO during PKCS7_verify(). A subsequent use of the BIO by the calling application results in a use-after-free condition. In the common case this occurs when the application later calls BIO_free() on the BIO originally passed to PKCS7_verify(). Depending on allocator behavior and application-specific BIO usage patterns, this may result in a crash or other memory corruption. In some application contexts this may potentially be exploitable for remote code execution. Applications that process PKCS#7 or S/MIME signed messages using OpenSSL PKCS#7 APIs may be affected. Applications using the CMS APIs for this processing are not affected. The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.
Weaknesses
References
- https://github.com/openssl/security/commit/3aad5eb7af4de4ee0633c30a8541a54d9bbde63c
- https://github.com/openssl/security/commit/7d4a980c62258c5910cc883936e0c8dbab4d75a8
- https://github.com/openssl/security/commit/9dfd688ad2290fc5075cacbc9bf0c9a93eefed54
- https://github.com/openssl/security/commit/a541ae8bfe849a30cc885e8780715c0f488e496c
- https://github.com/openssl/security/commit/c505d7559da5d5f9f2c3913c6883a5562ce7273e
- https://openssl-library.org/news/secadv/20260609.txt