OpenSSL Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Vulnerability - CVE-2026-22796

Issue summary: A type confusion vulnerability exists in the signature verification of signed PKCS7 data where an ASN1_TYPE union member is accessed without first validating the type causing an invalid or NULL pointer dereference when processing malformed PKCS7 data. Impact summary: An application performing signature verification of PKCS7 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 PKCS7 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 PKCS7 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.