The Diffie-Hellman Key Agreement Protocol allows remote attackers (from the client side) to send arbitrary numbers that are actually not public keys, and trigger expensive server-side DHE modular-exponentiation calculations, aka a D(HE)at or D(HE)ater attack. The client needs very little CPU resources and network bandwidth. The attack may be more disruptive in cases where a client can require a server to select its largest supported key size. The basic attack scenario is that the client must claim that it can only communicate with DHE, and the server must be configured to allow DHE.

A use-after-free vulnerability was found in OpenSSL's BIOnewNDEF function. The public API function BIOnewNDEF is a helper function used for streaming ASN.1 data via a BIO. It is primarily used internally by OpenSSL to support the SMIME, CMS, and PKCS7 streaming capabilities, but it may also be called directly by end-user applications. The function receives a BIO from the caller, prepends a new BIOfasn1 filter BIO onto the front of it to form a BIO chain, and then returns the new head of the BIO chain to the caller. Under certain conditions. For example, if a CMS recipient public key is invalid, the new filter BIO is freed, and the function returns a NULL result indicating a failure. However, in this case, the BIO chain is not properly cleaned up, and the BIO passed by the caller still retains internal pointers to the previously freed filter BIO. If the caller then calls BIOpop() on the BIO, a use-after-free will occur, possibly resulting in a crash.