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CRITICAL

X.509 Email Address 4-byte Buffer Overflow

Published Nov 1, 2022

Description

A buffer overrun can be triggered in X.509 certificate verification, specifically in name constraint checking. Note that this occurs after certificate chain signature verification and requires either a CA to have signed the malicious certificate or for the application to continue certificate verification despite failure to construct a path to a trusted issuer. An attacker can craft a malicious email address to overflow four attacker-controlled bytes on the stack. This buffer overflow could result in a crash (causing a denial of service) or potentially remote code execution. Many platforms implement stack overflow protections which would mitigate against the risk of remote code execution. The risk may be further mitigated based on stack layout for any given platform/compiler. Pre-announcements of CVE-2022-3602 described this issue as CRITICAL. Further analysis based on some of the mitigating factors described above have led this to be downgraded to HIGH. Users are still encouraged to upgrade to a new version as soon as possible. In a TLS client, this can be triggered by connecting to a malicious server. In a TLS server, this can be triggered if the server requests client authentication and a malicious client connects. Fixed in OpenSSL 3.0.7 (Affected 3.0.0,3.0.1,3.0.2,3.0.3,3.0.4,3.0.5,3.0.6).

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat statement

As per upstream, the most common situation where this can be triggered is when a server requests client authentication after a malicious client connects. A client connecting to a malicious server is also believed to be vulnerable in the same manner. Only OpenSSL versions 3.0.0 to 3.0.6 are vulnerable to this attack. The OpenSSL binaries in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 are compiled with Stack Smashing Protection. Also during the build process, the compiler rearranges the variables in a way that the buffer overflow is only able to overwrite the stack canaries, limiting the maximum impact of this flaw to denial of service. Remote code execution may not be possible in such cases. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 does not ship OpenSSL and is not directly affected by the flaw. However, container images which product ship are of RHEL 9 which were affected. RHOSP have fixed this by respining container images through the following errata: https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2022:7429

Metrics

Weaknesses (3)

CWE-120

Classic Buffer Overflow

CWE-787

Out-of-bounds Write

CWE-805

References (55)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner openssl
Published Nov 1, 2022
Updated Apr 14, 2026
Reserved Oct 19, 2022
Link CVE-2022-3602
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Apr 23, 2025
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Link CVE-2022-3602
Red Hat
Severity Important
Public date Nov 1, 2022
Links CVE-2022-3602 - Bugzilla
GHSA-8RWR-X37P-MX23