GHSA-vm8w-j6fw-jc7r · Severity: high — Issue summary: When a partial-chain certificate verification is enabled together with OCSP...
Issue summary: When a partial-chain certificate verification is enabled together with OCSP response checking for the whole chain, a NULL dereference will happen if the verified chain does not have a self-signed trusted anchor, crashing the process. Impact summary: A NULL pointer dereference can trigger a crash which leads to a Denial of Service for an application. When performing OCSP response checking for certificates in the verification chain, the code always tries to access the next certificate as the issuer. There is a check for a self-signed certificate. However with the partial chain verification enabled when the chain does not have a self-signed trusted anchor, the issuer will be NULL for the last certificate in the chain. A NULL pointer dereference then happens. This issue affects only applications which enable both OCSP verification of the certificate chain (X509_V_FLAG_OCSP_RESP_CHECK_ALL) and partial chain verification (X509_V_FLAG_PARTIAL_CHAIN) in the certificate verification. Both flags are disabled by default. For that reason, we have assigned Low severity to the issue. No FIPS modules are affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.
Conclusion & alert: CVE-2026-42765 is rated Moderate Risk (41.7/100): CVSS High severity, with low exploitation likelihood (EPSS 0.41%). Mandatory action: Review affected assets and schedule remediation.
Risk is dynamic; we continuously reassess and refresh what is shown on this page as upstream context changes.
EPSS lead: Daily EPSS estimates relative likelihood of exploitation; percentile ranks this CVE among scored vulnerabilities (higher = more severe relative rank).
| # | Date | Old EPSS score | New EPSS score | Delta (New - Old) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2026-06-15 | 0.03% | 0.41% | +0.38% |
| 2 | 2026-06-10 | — | 0.03% | — |
Full EPSS history (2 records total)
CVSS metrics for this CVE.
| Base score | Version | Severity | Vector | Exploitability | Impact | Score source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7.5 | 3.1 | HIGH |
|
3.9 | 3.6 | 134c704f-9b21-4f2e-91b3-4a467353bcc0 |
GHSA-vm8w-j6fw-jc7r · Severity: high — Issue summary: When a partial-chain certificate verification is enabled together with OCSP...
| vendor | priority | summary | link |
|---|---|---|---|
debian
|
unimportant | CVE-2026-42765 unimportant priority: Debian including 1 source packages (openssl), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5. | https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2026-42765 |
ubuntu
|
low | CVE-2026-42765 low priority: Ubuntu including 5 source packages (edk2, nodejs, openssl, openssl-fips, openssl1.0), 35 status rows across 9 suites (bionic, focal, jammy, noble, questing, resolute, trusty, upstream, xenial): not-affected 23, DNE 6, needs-triage 5, needed 1. | https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2026-42765 |