Disclosure summary
Issue summary: The first concurrent use of the same X.509 certificate by several threads may cause its cached extension data to be freed while another thread is still using it. Impact summary: A remote, unauthenticated peer could crash a multi-threaded TLS client, or a multi-threaded TLS server that requests client certificates, if the first certificate chains built to the same trusted CA certificate are built by several connections at the same time. This is a use-after-free read, which is likely to crash the process, resulting in a Denial of Service. CWE: CWE-416: Use After Free Description: OpenSSL caches the decoded values of a certificate's X.509v3 extensions inside the X509 object the first time they are needed. In OpenSSL 4.0 this cache is built in two phases: the extension values are computed while holding a read lock on the certificate, and the results are then installed into the certificate under a write lock. Because a read lock does not exclude other readers, several threads can compute the cache for the same certificate at the same time. Each thread that subsequently acquires the write lock installs its own results and frees the values installed by the thread before it, even though that earlier thread has already marked the cache as complete and may have returned pointers into it to its caller. A caller still using those pointers then reads freed memory. Any certificate shared between threads is exposed the first time its extensions are decoded. In TLS the certificates at risk are the trusted CA certificates supplied for chain verification, by whatever means, since these are shared by every connection and their extensions are decoded and cached the first time a chain is built to them. Certificates sent by the peer are decoded separately for each connection a
Source-reported weakness categories
CWE-416
Source-specific records & product guidance
Sources retain their own attribution and scoring. Follow the original record to confirm affected versions, fixed releases, and configuration conditions.
NIST National Vulnerability Database · NVD-CVE-2026-84783
Open original source · Updated Sep 29, 2026
Only CPE matches marked vulnerable=true are indexed. AND/OR platform conditions must be checked in the original NVD record.
Original records & references
PUBLISHED 2026-09-29T12:17:12-04:00
MODIFIED 2026-09-29T17:27:41-04:00
INGESTED 2026-10-06T11:43:05-04:00