Medium severity · published Aug 21, 2026
CVE-2026-45271
picotls has infinite recursion in the minicrypto ASN.1 decoder
5.5
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Picotls is a TLS protocol library that allows users select different crypto backends based on their use case. Picotls implements its own ASN.1 validation helper, which is used by the minicrypto backend while parsing local PKCS#8 private keys. Prior to commit c14231d801407640bc42c2dcf92783409ea6a7c7, the validator recursively descends into constructed ASN.1 elements without enforcing a maximum nesting depth. If an application loads an attacker-supplied private-key file through ptls_minicrypto_load_private_key(), or otherwise calls the public ASN.1 validation API on untrusted DER, a crafted deeply nested ASN.1 structure can exhaust the process stack and crash the application. Note that the libcrypto (OpenSSL) backend does not use the ASN.1 validation helper of picotls, and therefore is immune to this vulnerability. The vulnerability has been addressed in commit c14231d801407640bc42c2dcf92783409ea6a7c7.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.2% · higher than 4% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
PI
picotls · h2o
< c14231d801407640bc42c2dcf92783409ea6a7c7 · source: vendor