CVE-2022-3996: OpenSSL

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 1.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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 the `X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies()' function. Update (31 March 2023): The description of the policy processing enablement was corrected based on CVE-2023-0466.

Affected products

• OpenSSL OpenSSL: from 3.0.0, up to and including 3.0.7

Published 2022-12-13. Last modified 2026-06-17.