CVE-2022-3996: Improper Locking

December 13, 2022 (updated November 9, 2023)

If an X.509 certificate contains a malformed policy constraint and policy processing is enabled, then a write lock will be taken twice recursively. On some operating systems (most widely: Windows) this results in a denial of service when the affected process hangs. Policy processing being enabled on a publicly facing server is not considered to be a common setup. Policy processing is enabled by passing the -policy' argument to the command line utilities or by calling either X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy()’ or `X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies()’ functions.

References

github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/7725e7bfe6f2ce8146b6552b44e0d226be7638e7
nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2022-3996
www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20221213.txt

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