CVE-2016-8610 Denial of service in OpenSSL

What is CVE-2016-8610?

CVE-2016-8610 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 13 Nov 2017. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A denial of service flaw was found in OpenSSL 0.9.8, 1.0.1, 1.0.2 through 1.0.2h, and 1.1.0 in the way the TLS/SSL protocol defined processing of ALERT packets during a connection handshake. A remote attacker could use this flaw to make a TLS/SSL server consume an excessive amount of CPU and fail to accept connections from other clients.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-8610?

It affects 45 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Fujitsu M10-1 Firmware, Fujitsu M10-4 Firmware, Fujitsu M10-4s Firmware, Fujitsu M12-1 Firmware, Fujitsu M12-2 Firmware and 39 more.

How do I fix CVE-2016-8610?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2016-8610 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-8610 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Public exploit code: 1 proofs of concept on GitHub.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2016-8610, GHSA-v2q2-jxh8-m5h8, SUSE-SU-2018:3994-1, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-8610, USN-3183-2.