CVE-2026-45271
picotls has infinite recursion in the minicrypto ASN.1 decoder
Using picotls by h2o?
Get instant alerts when new vulnerabilities affect picotls - before attackers find them.
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.
Remediation
No guide yetNo remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet, and no fixed version or vendor advisory is recorded against it.
References (2)
SSVC — Action Prioritization
SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.
CVSS
- Attack Vector
- LOCAL
- Complexity
- LOW
- Privileges
- NONE
- User Interaction
- REQUIRED
- Scope
- UNCHANGED
- Confidentiality
- NONE
- Integrity
- NONE
- Availability
- HIGH
Quick Info
Get alerted
Stop reading CVE feeds looking for your own stack
Track the products you run and VulnTracker tells you when a new CVE affects them — with what is known about fixing it, and nothing about the rest.