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Not in CISA KEV
HIGH severity

Denial of service by double-checked locking in openssl-srcGHSA-vr8j-hgmm-jh9r

HIGHFix: openssl/openssl@7725e7b

GHSA-vr8j-hgmm-jh9r is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-667 vulnerability in openssl-src. A fix is available for openssl-src — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Also known asCVE-2022-3996
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Nov 7, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

No confirmed exploitation observed yet

  • CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
  • CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.

Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for GHSA-vr8j-hgmm-jh9r.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
1.3%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs71th percentile — riskier than 71% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.60%1.21%1.81%0.2%1.3%May 26Sep 26Nov 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

Where this sits among everything scored

Real-World Exposure

1 pkg affected
🦀openssl-src

Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.

Description

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 Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
🦀crates.ioopenssl-src≥ 300.0.0&&< 300.0.12300.0.12cargo update -p openssl-src --precise 300.0.12

Affected Products

1 product · 1 configurations
Application
opensslopenssl
≥ 3.0.0 && ≤ 3.0.7
range

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency

  1. Detect

    Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for openssl-src, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update openssl-src to 300.0.12 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-vr8j-hgmm-jh9r is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. Workarounds

    Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.

Frequently Asked Questions

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.
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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Denial of service by double-checked locking in openssl-src