A denial of service flaw was found in OpenSSL 0.9.8, 1.0.1, 1.0.2 through 1.0.2h, and 1.1.0 in the way the TLS/SSL protocol defined processing of ALERT packets during a connection handshake. A remote attacker could use this flaw to make a TLS/SSL server consume an excessive amount of CPU and fail to accept connections from other clients.

The TLS protocol 1.2 and earlier supports the rsafixeddh, dssfixeddh, rsafixedecdh, and ecdsafixedecdh values for ClientCertificateType but does not directly document the ability to compute the master secret in certain situations with a client secret key and server public key but not a server secret key, which makes it easier for man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof TLS servers by leveraging knowledge of the secret key for an arbitrary installed client X.509 certificate, aka the "Key Compromise Impersonation (KCI)" issue.