Findings

CVE-2024-5535

Issue summary: Calling the OpenSSL API function SSL_select_next_proto with an empty supported client protocols buffer may cause a crash or memory contents to be sent to the peer.

Published Jun 27, 2024 · updated Oct 15, 2026

Issue summary: Calling the OpenSSL API function SSL_select_next_proto with an empty supported client protocols buffer may cause a crash or memory contents to be sent to the peer. Impact summary: A buffer overread can have a range of potential consequences such as unexpected application beahviour or a crash. In particular this issue could result in up to 255 bytes of arbitrary private data from memory being sent to the peer leading to a loss of confidentiality. However, only applications that directly call the SSL_select_next_proto function with a 0 length list of supported client protocols are affected by this issue. This would normally never be a valid scenario and is typically not under attacker control but may occur by accident in the case of a configuration or programming error in the calling application. The OpenSSL API function SSL_select_next_proto is typically used by TLS applications that support ALPN (Application Layer Protocol Negotiation) or NPN (Next Protocol Negotiation). NPN is older, was never standardised and is deprecated in favour of ALPN. We believe that ALPN is significantly more widely deployed than NPN. The SSL_select_next_proto function accepts a list of protocols from the server and a list of protocols from the client and returns the first protocol that appears in the server list that also appears in the client list. In the case of no overlap between the two lists it returns the first item in the client list. In either case it will signal whether an overlap between the two lists was found. In the case where SSL_select_next_proto is called with a zero length client list it fails to notice this condition and returns the memory immediately following the client list pointer (and reports that there was no overlap in the lists). This function is typically called from a server side application callback for ALPN or a client side application callback for NPN. In the case of ALPN the list of protocols supplied by the client is guaranteed by libssl to