OpenSSL: denial of service

Why it is Yellow

• CVSS 5.3 medium
• On your watchlist: openssl

References

• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/32d0ed8afe1b8c3e7ece725b44663da3d7087a09
• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/ca8402e273af4de5b3f04fa61a0f0c02ce3ae20e
• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/eb2becc0a4baea7f3050a247834d0e5c2ebe1773
• https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/f42ae513bbda513b3c121d54834040ee4a0eae1a
• https://openssl-library.org/news/secadv/20260929.txt

Original description

Issue summary: The QUIC stream reassembly algorithm performance deteriorates progressively as packets are arriving out of order. The worst case has a quadratic complexity proportional to the number of stream frames kept in the buffer for the received stream data. Impact summary: A remote QUIC peer that completes the handshake can create a connection-scoped CPU pressure and potentially a Denial of Service using compliant STREAM frames inside the advertised receive window, with low attacker bandwidth. CWE: CWE-407: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity Description: OpenSSL manages received QUIC stream fragments using a doubly-linked list. While it optimizes for append operations (at the end of the list), it falls back to a head-to-tail linear search for any fragment that does not immediately follow the current `tail`. By manipulating the sequence of offsets, an attacker can force the server to perform O(n^2) operations, consuming excessive CPU time for the QUIC process. FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as the QUIC implementation is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.