Medium severity · published Jan 27, 2026
CVE-2025-66199
TLS 1.3 CompressedCertificate excessive memory allocation
5.9
CVSS
0.5%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Issue summary: A TLS 1.3 connection using certificate compression can be
forced to allocate a large buffer before decompression without checking
against the configured certificate size limit.
Impact summary: An attacker can cause per-connection memory allocations of
up to approximately 22 MiB and extra CPU work, potentially leading to
service degradation or resource exhaustion (Denial of Service).
In affected configurations, the peer-supplied uncompressed certificate
length from a CompressedCertificate message is used to grow a heap buffer
prior to decompression. This length is not bounded by the max_cert_list
setting, which otherwise constrains certificate message sizes. An attacker
can exploit this to cause large per-connection allocations followed by
handshake failure. No memory corruption or information disclosure occurs.
This issue only affects builds where TLS 1.3 certificate compression is
compiled in (i.e., not OPENSSL_NO_COMP_ALG) and at least one compression
algorithm (brotli, zlib, or zstd) is available, and where the compression
extension is negotiated. Both clients receiving a server CompressedCertificate
and servers in mutual TLS scenarios receiving a client CompressedCertificate
are affected. Servers that do not request client certificates are not
vulnerable to client-initiated attacks.
Users can mitigate this issue by setting SSL_OP_NO_RX_CERTIFICATE_COMPRESSION
to disable receiving compressed certificates.
The FIPS modules in 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.3 are not affected by this issue,
as the TLS implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.
OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.3 are vulnerable to this issue.
OpenSSL 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are not affected by this issue.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
High
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.5% · higher than 40% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
OP
OpenSSL · OpenSSL
3.6.0 before 3.6.1; 3.5.0 before 3.5.5; 3.4.0 before 3.4.4; 3.3.0 before 3.3.6 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-66199
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-66199
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/3ed1f75249932b155eef993a8e66a99cb98bfef4
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/6184a4fb08ee6d7bca570d931a4e8bef40b64451
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/895150b5e021d16b52fb32b97e1dd12f20448be5
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/966a2478046c311ed7dae50c457d0db4cafbf7e4
Vendor Advisory
https://openssl-library.org/news/secadv/20260127.txt
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