CVE-2026-5501 PUBLISHED

Improper Certificate Signature Verification in X.509 Chain Validation Allows Forged Leaf Certificates

Assigner: wolfSSL
Reserved: 03.04.2026 Published: 10.04.2026 Updated: 10.04.2026

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 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
CVSS Score: 8.6

Product Status

Vendor wolfSSL
Product wolfSSL
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 5.9.0 (incl.)

Credits

  • Calif.io in collaboration with Claude and Anthropic Research finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-295 Improper certificate validation CWE