SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityAnalyzed

CVE-2026-42772

Impact summary: A remote QUIC peer that completes the handshake can create a connection-scoped CPU pressure and potentially a Denial of Service using compliant STREAM frames inside the advertised receive window, with low attacker bandwidth.

MEDIUM 5.3EPSS 0.48%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.48%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

Issue summary: The QUIC stream reassembly algorithm performance deteriorates progressively as packets are arriving out of order. The worst case has a quadratic complexity proportional to the number of stream frames kept in the buffer for the received stream data. Impact summary: A remote QUIC peer that completes the handshake can create a connection-scoped CPU pressure and potentially a Denial of Service using compliant STREAM frames inside the advertised receive window, with low attacker bandwidth. CWE: CWE-407: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity Description: OpenSSL manages received QUIC stream fragments using a doubly-linked list. While it optimizes for append operations (at the end of the list), it falls back to a head-to-tail linear search for any fragment that does not immediately follow the current `tail`. By manipulating the sequence of offsets, an attacker can force the server to perform O(n^2) operations, consuming excessive CPU time for the QUIC process. FIPS impact: no The FIPS module is not affected as the QUIC implementation is outside of the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

CVSS 3.1
5.3 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
EPSS
0.48% probability · 41th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-407
Affected
openssl/openssl
Source
openssl-security@openssl.org
EPSS trend
0%3%5%30 September 2026: 0.17%26 October 2026: 0.48%30 September 202626 October 2026

EPSS moved from 0.2% on 30 September 2026 to 0.5% on 26 October 2026.

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.