python-cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers. Prior to 49.0.0, when resolving invalid certificate chains that include duplicate copies of self-signed certificates, the processing recursively invokes the same candidate, leading to an exponential blowup. Although the limitation that the chain depth cannot exceed a specified maximum depth prevents unbounded recursion and guarantees termination, an attacker-controlled certificate chain can lead the processing to easily take more than 5s to reject in testing. This amplification could form the basis for a resource exhaustion denial of service attack. The core issue arises in the recursive nature of build_chain_inner, which does not de-duplicate against previously analyzed candidates. As the correctness of validation is not affected, the integrity of a system cannot be compromised through this vector, only its availability. This issue is fixed in 49.0.0.
Advisories
| Source | ID | Title |
|---|---|---|
Github GHSA |
GHSA-jwv3-5hgf-82ww | python-cryptography: Duplicate self-signed intermediates can cause exponential path-building |
Fixes
Solution
No solution given by the vendor.
Workaround
No workaround given by the vendor.
References
History
Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:45:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| First Time appeared |
Pyca
Pyca cryptography |
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| Vendors & Products |
Pyca
Pyca cryptography |
Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:45:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| Description | python-cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers. Prior to 49.0.0, when resolving invalid certificate chains that include duplicate copies of self-signed certificates, the processing recursively invokes the same candidate, leading to an exponential blowup. Although the limitation that the chain depth cannot exceed a specified maximum depth prevents unbounded recursion and guarantees termination, an attacker-controlled certificate chain can lead the processing to easily take more than 5s to reject in testing. This amplification could form the basis for a resource exhaustion denial of service attack. The core issue arises in the recursive nature of build_chain_inner, which does not de-duplicate against previously analyzed candidates. As the correctness of validation is not affected, the integrity of a system cannot be compromised through this vector, only its availability. This issue is fixed in 49.0.0. | |
| Title | python-cryptography: Duplicate self-signed intermediates can cause exponential path-building | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-400 | |
| References |
| |
| Metrics |
cvssV4_0
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Projects
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Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: GitHub_M
Published:
Updated: 2026-08-03T21:26:45.826Z
Reserved: 2026-08-03T19:54:19.852Z
Link: CVE-2026-69249
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OpenCVE Enrichment
Updated: 2026-08-03T22:30:02Z
Weaknesses
Github GHSA