CVE-2026-54874: Excessive Memory Use Buffering DTLS Records for a Future Epoch
Vendor fix available · Affected: OpenSSL · Exploitation: unlikely (under 1%)
Not in CyberSIXT coverage yet: no article names this CVE. This page shows the public record.
Higher than 50% of scored CVEs
DescriptionCVE.org
Issue summary: Receiving a DTLS record for a future epoch while a handshake is in progress causes OpenSSL to buffer far more memory than the record itself requires. Impact summary: A peer can use a small amount of network traffic to make an OpenSSL DTLS endpoint retain a disproportionately large amount of memory, which may lead to a Denial of Service. CWE: CWE-405: Asymmetric Resource Consumption (Amplification) Description: While a DTLS handshake is in progress, a peer may legitimately have already moved on to the next epoch (for example, having sent its ChangeCipherSpec and Finished messages) before the local endpoint has processed the same transition, typically because of reordering on the underlying UDP transport. OpenSSL buffers such early records so that they can be processed once the local endpoint catches up. Buffering a record currently retains the entire read buffer it arrived in, which is sized to hold the largest possible DTLS record (around 16 kilobytes), rather than just the bytes that make up the record itself. Up to 100 such records may be buffered per connection. As a result, a peer that sends a stream of small forged records claiming to belong to the next epoch can cause an OpenSSL DTLS endpoint to retain around 1.7 megabytes of memory, despite sending only a small fraction of that amount of data over the network. An attacker therefore gains a memory amplification factor of around 1200, and can multiply the effect across as many associations as it is able to open, making this a remote memory exhaustion Denial of Service risk for DTLS servers. Since the memory retained per connection remains bounded, and any limit an application already places on the number of concurrent associations also bounds the total exposure, this issue has been assessed as Low severity. FIPS impact: no No FIPS modules are affected by this issue as the affected code is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.
Affected products1
From the CVE record. A product or version that is not listed is unknown, not unaffected.
- OpenSSL · OpenSSLfrom 4.0.0 before 4.0.2; from 3.6.0 before 3.6.4; from 3.5.0 before 3.5.8; from 3.4.0 before 3.4.7; from 3.0.0 before 3.0.22; from 1.1.1 before 1.1.1zi and 1 more
On the Atlas
Every published CVE is on the CyberSIXT Atlas, grouped by weakness, vendor and month.
- Exploitation
- Unlikely (under 1%). EPSS under 1%, or no score yet.
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Public check
- No public nuclei template
- Vendor
- OpenSSL
- Published
- August 2026
CoverageNo articles yet
No CyberSIXT article names CVE-2026-54874 yet, so there is no coverage timeline, action brief or change log for it. Everything on this page comes from the public CVE record, CISA KEV, EPSS and the nuclei template index. Search the archive or see the CVEs in the news.