HarborGuard / CVE
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HIGHCVE-2026-5501Published Modified CNA wolfSSL

CVE-2026-5501: Improper Certificate Signature Verification in X.509 Chain Validation Allows Forged Leaf Certificates

wolfSSL_X509_verify_cert in the OpenSSL compatibility layer accepts a certificate chain in which the leaf's signature is not checked, if the attacker supplies an untrusted intermediate with Basic Constraints `CA:FALSE` that is legitimately signed by a trusted root. An attacker who obtains any leaf certificate from a trusted CA (e.g. a free DV cert from Let's Encrypt) can forge a certificate for any subject name with any public key and arbitrary signature bytes, and the function returns `WOLFSSL_SUCCESS` / `X509_V_OK`. The native wolfSSL TLS handshake path (`ProcessPeerCerts`) is not susceptible and the issue is limited to applications using the OpenSSL compatibility API directly, which would include integrations of wolfSSL into nginx and haproxy.

Metrics

CVSS v4.0
8.6
Severity
HIGH
Fixed in
Affected Products
1
Affected packages
  • wolfSSL / wolfSSL
    ≤ 5.9.0
CVSS Vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
References