CVE-2026-5501

Publication date

2026-04-10 03:07:39

Family

wolfSSL

State

PUBLISHED

Description

wolfSSL_X509_verify_cert in the OpenSSL compatibility layer accepts a certificate chain in which the leafs signature is not checked, if the attacker supplies an untrusted intermediate with Basic Constraints `CA:FALSE` that is legitimately signed by a trusted root. An attacker who obtains any leaf certificate from a trusted CA (e.g. a free DV cert from Lets Encrypt) can forge a certificate for any subject name with any public key and arbitrary signature bytes, and the function returns `WOLFSSL_SUCCESS` / `X509_V_OK`. The native wolfSSL TLS handshake path (`ProcessPeerCerts`) is not susceptible and the issue is limited to applications using the OpenSSL compatibility API directly, which would include integrations of wolfSSL into nginx and haproxy.