A denial of service vulnerability was found in zlib-rs, triggered by specially constructed input. This input causes a stack overflow, resulting in the process using zlib-rs to crash.

Impact

Due to the way LLVM handles the zlib-rs codebase, tail calls were not guaranteed. This caused certain input patterns to result in a large number of stack frames being required, quickly resulting in a stack overflow. These are unlikely to occur in practice, but a dedicated attacker can construct malicious input files.

After stack overflows were found by @inahga with a fuzzer, we dove into the assembly, and found some cases where the stack grew

.LBB109_326:
    mov rdi, rbx
    call zlib_rs::inflate::State::type_do
    jmp .LBB109_311

.LBB109_311:
    lea rsp, [rbp - 40]
    pop rbx
    pop r12
    pop r13
    pop r14
    pop r15
    pop rbp
    .cfi_def_cfa rsp, 8
    ret

LLVM wants to centralize the cleanup before the return (many other blocks jump to LBB109_311), thereby invalidating a tail call to type_do. We were not able to get rid of this call without introducing one elsewhere: we just don't currently have the power to tell LLVM what we want it to do.

So, we switch back to loop+match waiting for changes to rust to make a more efficient implementation possible. Performance-wise, the damage is relatively minimal: we're just slower in cases where we already were slower than C. We are faster in cases where the relevant code is barely touched (in these cases the logic quickly moves into a hot inner loop and just spends most of its time there).

Patches

Version 0.4.0 patches the problem and is no longer vulnerable.

Workarounds

Users of zlib-rs should upgrade to the latest version. Users could alternatively run zlib-rs in a separate process to prevent a stack overflow crashing the entire program. In some situations a signal handler can be used to catch a stack overflow happening.

If a certificate had more than one distributionPoint, then only the first distributionPoint would be considered against each CRL's IssuingDistributionPoint distributionPoint, and then the certificate's subsequent distributionPoints would be ignored.

The impact was that correctly provided CRLs would not be consulted to check revocation. With UnknownStatusPolicy::Deny (the default) this would lead to incorrect but safe Error::UnknownRevocationStatus. With UnknownStatusPolicy::Allow this would lead to inappropriate acceptance of revoked certificates.

This vulnerability is thought to be of limited impact. This is because both the certificate and CRL are signed -- an attacker would need to compromise a trusted issuing authority to trigger this bug. An attacker with such capabilities could likely bypass revocation checking through other more impactful means (such as publishing a valid, empty CRL.)

More likely, this bug would be latent in normal use, and an attacker could leverage faulty revocation checking to continue using a revoked credential.

This vulnerability is identified as GHSA-pwjx-qhcg-rvj4. Thank you to @1seal for the report.

Name constraints for URI names were ignored and therefore accepted.

Note this library does not provide an API for asserting URI names, and URI name constraints are otherwise not implemented. URI name constraints are now rejected unconditionally.

Since name constraints are restrictions on otherwise properly-issued certificates, this bug is reachable only after signature verification and requires misissuance to exploit.

This vulnerability is identified as GHSA-965h-392x-2mh5. Thank you to @1seal for the report.

Permitted subtree name constraints for DNS names were accepted for certificates asserting a wildcard name.

This was incorrect because, given a name constraint of accept.example.com, *.example.com could feasibly allow a name of reject.example.com which is outside the constraint. This is very similar to CVE-2025-61727.

Since name constraints are restrictions on otherwise properly-issued certificates, this bug is reachable only after signature verification and requires misissuance to exploit.

This vulnerability is identified as GHSA-xgp8-3hg3-c2mh. Thank you to @1seal for the report.

A panic was reachable when parsing certificate revocation lists via [BorrowedCertRevocationList::from_der] or [OwnedCertRevocationList::from_der]. This was the result of mishandling a syntactically valid empty BIT STRING appearing in the onlySomeReasons element of a IssuingDistributionPoint CRL extension.

This panic is reachable prior to a CRL's signature being verified.

Applications that do not use CRLs are not affected.

Thank you to @tynus3 for the report.