idna 0.5.0 and earlier accepts Punycode labels that do not produce any non-ASCII output, which means that either ASCII labels or the empty root label can be masked such that they appear unequal without IDNA processing or when processed with a different implementation and equal when processed with idna 0.5.0 or earlier.

Concretely, example.org and xn--example-.org become equal after processing by idna 0.5.0 or earlier. Also, example.org.xn-- and example.org. become equal after processing by idna 0.5.0 or earlier.

In applications using idna (but not in idna itself) this may be able to lead to privilege escalation when host name comparison is part of a privilege check and the behavior is combined with a client that resolves domains with such labels instead of treating them as errors that preclude DNS resolution / URL fetching and with the attacker managing to introduce a DNS entry (and TLS certificate) for an xn---masked name that turns into the name of the target when processed by idna 0.5.0 or earlier.

Remedy

Upgrade to idna 1.0.3 or later, if depending on idna directly, or to url 2.5.4 or later, if depending on idna via url. (This issue was fixed in idna 1.0.0, but versions earlier than 1.0.3 are not recommended for other reasons.)

When upgrading, please take a moment to read about alternative Unicode back ends for idna.

If you are using Rust earlier than 1.81 in combination with SQLx 0.8.2 or earlier, please also read an issue about combining them with url 2.5.4 and idna 1.0.3.

Additional information

This issue resulted from idna 0.5.0 and earlier implementing the UTS 46 specification literally on this point and the specification having this bug. The specification bug has been fixed in revision 33 of UTS 46.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to kageshiron for recognizing the security implications of this behavior.

ring::aead::quic::HeaderProtectionKey::new_mask() may panic when overflow checking is enabled. In the QUIC protocol, an attacker can induce this panic by sending a specially-crafted packet. Even unintentionally it is likely to occur in 1 out of every 2**32 packets sent and/or received.

On 64-bit targets operations using ring::aead::{AES_128_GCM, AES_256_GCM} may panic when overflow checking is enabled, when encrypting/decrypting approximately 68,719,476,700 bytes (about 64 gigabytes) of data in a single chunk. Protocols like TLS and SSH are not affected by this because those protocols break large amounts of data into small chunks. Similarly, most applications will not attempt to encrypt/decrypt 64GB of data in one chunk.

Overflow checking is not enabled in release mode by default, but RUSTFLAGS="-C overflow-checks" or overflow-checks = true in the Cargo.toml profile can override this. Overflow checking is usually enabled by default in debug mode.

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.

The h2 crate, used internally by hyper, had a flaw that would accept and queue empty DATA frames without limit. If streams were not actively drained, this could lead to unbounded memory usage, or a panic if the length overflows.

Low severity.

Patched in v0.4.16.