Mbed TLS before 3.6.4 allows a use-after-free in certain situations of applications that are develop...
Mbed TLS before 3.6.4 allows a use-after-free in certain situations of applications that are developed in accordance with the documentation. The function mbedtlsx509stringtonames() takes a head argument that is documented as an output argument. The documentation does not suggest that the function will free that pointer; however, the function does call mbedtlsasn1freenameddatalist() on that argument, which performs a deep free(). As a result, application code that uses this function (relying only on documented behavior) is likely to still hold pointers to the memory blocks that were freed, resulting in a high risk of use-after-free or double-free. In particular, the two sample programs x509/certwrite and x509/cert_req are affected (use-after-free if the san string contains more than one DN).
References
- https://github.com/Mbed-TLS/mbedtls-docs/blob/main/security-advisories/mbedtls-security-advisory-2025-06-7.md
- https://mbed-tls.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tech-updates/security-advisories/
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/08/msg00013.html
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/08/msg00025.html