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High

Heap Buffer Overflow in OpenSSL ASN.1 Multibyte String Conversion

IdentifiersCVE-2026-7383CWE-190

CVE-2026-7383 is a low-severity vulnerability in OpenSSL's ASN.1 multibyte string conversion logic, specifically in ASN1_mbstring_copy() and ASN1_mbstring_ncopy(). The flaw is caused by a signed integer overflow when calculating the destination buffer size for Unicode output. For BMPSTRING (UTF-16) and UNIVERSALSTRING (UTF-32), the size is derived by left-shifting the input character count; for UTF8STRING, the size is accumulated from per-character byte counts. When the input reaches roughly 2^30 characters, the signed int used for sizing can overflow. In the worst case, a UNIVERSALSTRING input of about 2^30 characters causes the computed size to wrap to zero, resulting in OPENSSL_malloc(1) followed by a copy operation that writes far beyond the allocated heap buffer. OpenSSL states that normal X.509 certificate processing does not reach this condition because ASN1_STRING_set_by_NID() applies DIRSTRING_TYPE restrictions and per-NID length limits, excluding the dangerous UNIVERSALSTRING path in certificate handling.

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ANALYST BRIEF

Impact, mitigation & remediation

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Impact

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Successful exploitation can cause a heap buffer overflow, leading to process crashes, memory corruption, undefined behavior, and potentially attacker-controlled code execution. OpenSSL assessed the issue as Low severity because no standard network protocol or certificate-processing path in OpenSSL is known to exercise the vulnerable condition, and exploitation requires unusually large attacker-controlled input.

Mitigation

If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.

Avoid exposing ASN1_mbstring_copy() and ASN1_mbstring_ncopy() to attacker-controlled input, especially very large Unicode strings. Do not register custom ASN.1 string types via ASN1_STRING_TABLE_add() in ways that permit oversized attacker-supplied BMPSTRING, UNIVERSALSTRING, or UTF8STRING values. Enforce strict application-level maximum input lengths well below the overflow threshold. Where possible, rely on standard OpenSSL certificate-handling paths rather than direct use of the affected low-level APIs.

Remediation

Patch, then assume compromise.

Upgrade to a vendor-fixed OpenSSL release for the affected branch. The provided context indicates fixes were issued in OpenSSL 4.0.1, 3.6.3, 3.5.7, 3.4.6, and 3.0.21. Downstream operating system and distribution packages should be updated to their corresponding patched builds. If source-level remediation is required, the vulnerable size calculations in ASN1_mbstring_copy() and ASN1_mbstring_ncopy() must be changed to use overflow-safe bounds checking and appropriately sized integer types before allocation and copy operations.
PUBLIC EXPLOITS

Exploits

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VALID 0 / 0 TOTALView more in app

No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.

EXPOSURE SURFACE

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FreebsdFreebsdapplication

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