I would love for someone to tell me how big a deal these vulnerabilities are, and how hard people had previously been trying to catch them. The blog post says that two were severity “Moderate”, and one was “Low”, but I don’t really know how to interpret this.
Two of the bugs AISLE highlighted are memory corruption primitives. They could be used in certain situations to crash a program that was running OpenSSL (like a web server), which is a denial of service risk. Because of modern compiler safety techniques, they can’t on their own be used to access data or run code, but they’re still concerning because it sometimes turns out to be possible to chain primitives like these into more dangerous exploits.
The third bug is a “timing side-channel bug” with a particular opt-in certificate algorithm that OpenSSL provides, when used on ARM architectures. It’s a pretty niche circumstance but it does look legitimate to me. The only way to know if it’s exploitable would be to try to build some kind of a PoC.
OpenSSL is a very hardened target, and lots of security researchers look at it. Any security-relevant bugs found on OpenSSL are pretty impressive.
Short answer: these aren’t Heartbleed-class, but they’re absolutely worth patching.
Two signals:
(i) OpenSSL itself minted CVEs for them. This is non-trivial given its conservative posture,
and
(ii) fixes were backported across supported branches (3.5.4 / 3.4.3 / 3.3.5 / 3.2.6, with distro backports).
For context, per OpenSSL’s own vulnerability index as of today (3 Nov 2025), there were 4 CVEs in 2025 YTD (CVE-2025-), 9 in 2024 (CVE-2024-), 18 in 2023 (CVE-2023-), 15 in 2022 (CVE-2022-). Getting any CVE there is hard. “Low/Medium” here mostly reflects narrow preconditions and prevalence within typical OpenSSL usage, not that the primitives themselves are trivial. The score (called CVSS) compresses likelihood and impact into one scalar.
I would love for someone to tell me how big a deal these vulnerabilities are, and how hard people had previously been trying to catch them. The blog post says that two were severity “Moderate”, and one was “Low”, but I don’t really know how to interpret this.
Two of the bugs AISLE highlighted are memory corruption primitives. They could be used in certain situations to crash a program that was running OpenSSL (like a web server), which is a denial of service risk. Because of modern compiler safety techniques, they can’t on their own be used to access data or run code, but they’re still concerning because it sometimes turns out to be possible to chain primitives like these into more dangerous exploits.
The third bug is a “timing side-channel bug” with a particular opt-in certificate algorithm that OpenSSL provides, when used on ARM architectures. It’s a pretty niche circumstance but it does look legitimate to me. The only way to know if it’s exploitable would be to try to build some kind of a PoC.
OpenSSL is a very hardened target, and lots of security researchers look at it. Any security-relevant bugs found on OpenSSL are pretty impressive.
Short answer: these aren’t Heartbleed-class, but they’re absolutely worth patching.
Two signals: (i) OpenSSL itself minted CVEs for them. This is non-trivial given its conservative posture, and (ii) fixes were backported across supported branches (3.5.4 / 3.4.3 / 3.3.5 / 3.2.6, with distro backports).
For context, per OpenSSL’s own vulnerability index as of today (3 Nov 2025), there were 4 CVEs in 2025 YTD (CVE-2025-), 9 in 2024 (CVE-2024-), 18 in 2023 (CVE-2023-), 15 in 2022 (CVE-2022-). Getting any CVE there is hard. “Low/Medium” here mostly reflects narrow preconditions and prevalence within typical OpenSSL usage, not that the primitives themselves are trivial. The score (called CVSS) compresses likelihood and impact into one scalar.