CVE-2026-22796 Details
Issue summary: A type confusion vulnerability exists in the signature
verification of signed PKCS#7 data where an ASN1_TYPE union member is
accessed without first validating the type, causing an invalid or NULL
pointer dereference when processing malformed PKCS#7 data.

Impact summary: An application performing signature verification of PKCS#7
data or calling directly the PKCS7_digest_from_attributes() function can be
caused to dereference an invalid or NULL pointer when reading, resulting in
a Denial of Service.

The function PKCS7_digest_from_attributes() accesses the message digest attribute
value without validating its type. When the type is not V_ASN1_OCTET_STRING,
this results in accessing invalid memory through the ASN1_TYPE union, causing
a crash.

Exploiting this vulnerability requires an attacker to provide a malformed
signed PKCS#7 to an application that verifies it. The impact of the
exploit is just a Denial of Service, the PKCS7 API is legacy and applications
should be using the CMS API instead. For these reasons the issue was
assessed as Low severity.

The FIPS modules in 3.5, 3.4, 3.3 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue,
as the PKCS#7 parsing implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module
boundary.

OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are vulnerable to this issue.
View at NVD
Exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS) score for CVE-2026-22796
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System): EPSS predicts the likelihood that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild. A higher percentage means a greater chance of an exploit occurring. The EPSS model produces a probability score between 0 and 1 (0 and 100%).
0.08 Probability of exploitation activity being observed over the next 30 days (23nd percentile)
CVSS score for CVE-2026-22796
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System): An open framework owned and managed by FIRST.Org, Inc. that assigns a numerical score from 0 to 10 to software vulnerabilities to indicate their severity.
5.3 Medium
Products affected by CVE-2026-22796
OpenSSL 1.0.2u
OpenSSL 1.0.2v
OpenSSL 1.0.2x
OpenSSL 1.0.2y
OpenSSL 1.0.2za
DVE Score by Bitsight AI
DVE scores complement traditional static scoring systems like CVSS with Bitsight AI powered real-time threat intelligence and underground cyber criminal activity so that security teams can reduce alert fatigue and focus on vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited.
Low
More on DVE scores

CVE-2026-22796 Global Footprint

Top 10 Identified Countries

Country Observations Percentage
US 121,076 28.06%
JP 47,912 11.10%
DE 26,978 6.25%
IT 15,787 3.66%
FR 14,989 3.47%
NL 14,917 3.46%
IN 14,606 3.39%
KR 14,485 3.36%
CA 14,456 3.35%
CN 13,748 3.19%

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CVE-2026-22796 Industry Footprint

Top 10 Identified Industries

*Service provider organizations (typically Technology and Telecommunications) are disproportionally represented in the results given their upstream ownership of end-user infrastructure. See our FAQs.

Industry* Observations Percentage
Technology 221,294 74.08%
Telecommunications 53,270 17.83%
Education 11,460 3.84%
Government/Politics 3,827 1.28%
Business Services 1,572 0.53%
Manufacturing 930 0.31%
Finance 825 0.28%
Utilities 700 0.23%
Transportation 630 0.21%
Healthcare/Wellness 570 0.19%

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