CVE-2026-54874 Excessive Memory Use Buffering DTLS Records for a Future Epoch

What is CVE-2026-54874?

CVE-2026-54874 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Openssl Openssl, published on 25 Aug 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Issue summary: Receiving a DTLS record for a future epoch while a handshake is in progress causes OpenSSL to buffer far more memory than the record itself requires.

Impact summary: A peer can use a small amount of network traffic to make an OpenSSL DTLS endpoint retain a disproportionately large amount of memory, which may lead to a Denial of Service.

CWE: CWE-405: Asymmetric Resource Consumption (Amplification)

Description: While a DTLS handshake is in progress, a peer may legitimately have already moved on to the next epoch (for example, having sent its ChangeCipherSpec and Finished messages) before the local endpoint has processed the same transition, typically because of reordering on the underlying UDP transport. OpenSSL buffers such early records so that they can be processed once the local endpoint catches up.

Buffering a record currently retains the entire read buffer it arrived in, which is sized to hold the largest possible DTLS record (around 16 kilobytes), rather than just the bytes that make up the record itself. Up to 100 such records may be buffered per connection. As a result, a peer that sends a stream of small forged records claiming to belong to the next epoch can cause an OpenSSL DTLS endpoint to retain around 1.7 megabytes of memory, despite sending only a small fraction of that amount of data over the network.

An attacker therefore gains a memory amplification factor of around 1200, and can multiply the effect across as many associations as it is able to open, making this a remote memory exhaustion Denial of Service risk for DTLS servers. Since the memory retained per connection remains bounded, and any limit an application already places on the number of concurrent associations also bounds the total exposure, this issue has been assessed as Low severity.

FIPS impact: no

No FIPS modules are affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

OpenSSL 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.0, 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are vulnerable to this issue.

OpenSSL 4.0 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 4.0.2. OpenSSL 3.6 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.6.4. OpenSSL 3.5 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.5.8. OpenSSL 3.4 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.4.7. OpenSSL 3.0 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 3.0.22.

Premium support customers only: OpenSSL 1.1.1 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 1.1.1zi OpenSSL 1.0.2 users should upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.2zr

This issue was reported on 18 May 2026 by Amazon Web Services. The fix has been developed by Matt Caswell.

-- cut (non-publishing metadata for internal use) -- Reported by: Amazon Web Services Fixed by: Matt Caswell

Weakness: CWE-405

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-54874?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Openssl Openssl.

How do I fix CVE-2026-54874?

Apply the vendor's patch.

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-2026-54874 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-54874 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Openssl Openssl

• CVE-2009-3245 Null dereference in n/a Critical 10.0
• CVE-2006-3738 Memory corruption in n/a Critical 10.0
• CVE-2026-63073 Untrusted Sender DN Used as Format String in CMP Response Validation Critical 9.8
• CVE-2016-6309 Use after free in n/a Critical 9.8
• CVE-2016-0799 Integer overflow in n/a Critical 9.8

All Openssl Openssl vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as ALPINE-CVE-2026-54874, AZL-97668, AZL-97953, BELL-CVE-2026-54874, CLEANSTART-2026-QG73880, CLSA-2026-1788263953 and 17 more.