CVE-2026-69249 — python-cryptography: Duplicate self-signed intermediates can cause exponential path-building
python-cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers. In versions 42.0.0 through 48.0.0, when resolving invalid certific…
Published: 2026-08-03 · CVSS: 8.7 · CVSS 4.0
python-cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers. In versions 42.0.0 through 48.0.0, 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.
Source: CVE Program · Revision 8b16575c39f1e1810c5e863010da073d2d3285e7