CVE-2026-22796: ASN1_TYPE Type Confusion in the PKCS7_digest_from_attributes() function

Issue summary: A type confusion vulnerability exists in the signature verification of signed PKCS#7 data where an ASN1TYPE 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 PKCS7digestfromattributes() function can be caused to dereference an invalid or NULL pointer when reading, resulting in a Denial of Service.

The function PKCS7digestfromattributes() accesses the message digest attribute value without validating its type. When the type is not VASN1OCTETSTRING, this results in accessing invalid memory through the ASN1TYPE 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.