CMS Null dereference

published 2017-05-04 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2016-7933

cvss: 7.5; version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 21.7%; EPSS 21.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 97%
public exploits: 0; none known

In OpenSSL 1.1.0 before 1.1.0c, applications parsing invalid CMS structures can crash with a NULL pointer dereference. This is caused by a bug in the handling of the ASN.1 CHOICE type in OpenSSL 1.1.0 which can result in a NULL value being passed to the structure callback if an attempt is made to free certain invalid encodings. Only CHOICE structures using a callback which do not handle NULL value are affected.

Patch / fix

distros 1

openssl Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.1.0c-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2016-7053

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2016-7053 updated 2026-11-05 cvss 5.9

openssl: CMS Null dereference vulnerability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 openssl, openssl097a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 openssl, openssl098e, openssl-perl Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 OVMF, openssl, openssl098e, openssl-libs, openssl-perl Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 openssl Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Web Server 1 openssl Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Web Server 2 openssl

+1 more productsfewer

Red Hat JBoss Web Server 3 openssl

not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

21.68% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 97% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
NVD	3.0	7.5	CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD	2.0	5.0	AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Affected products

OpenSSL OpenSSL

Classification

Weakness

CWE-476 NULL Pointer Dereference

Technology feeds

OpenSSL rss critical rss

References

openssl.org /news/secadv/20161110.txt
vendor-advisory
h20566.www2.hpe.com /hpsc/doc/public/display?docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-hpesbhf03744en_us
securityfocus.com /bid/94244
vdb-entry, third-party-advisory
securitytracker.com /id/1037261
vdb-entry

Sources

CVE List CVE-2016-7053
NVD CVE-2016-7053

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

Summary