cryptography has incomplete DNS name constraint enforcement on peer names
Summary
In versions of cryptography prior to 46.0.5, DNS name constraints were only validated against SANs within child certificates, and not the "peer name" presented during each validation. Consequently, cryptography would allow a peer named bar.example.com to validate against a wildcard leaf certificate for *.example.com, even if the leaf's parent certificate (or upwards) contained an excluded subtree constraint for bar.example.com.
This behavior resulted from a gap between RFC 5280 (which defines Name Constraint semantics) and RFC 9525 (which defines service identity semantics): put together, neither states definitively whether Name Constraints should be applied to peer names. To close this gap, cryptography now conservatively rejects any validation where the peer name would be rejected by a name constraint if it were a SAN instead.
In practice, exploitation of this bypass requires an uncommon X.509 topology, one that the Web PKI avoids because it exhibits these kinds of problems. Consequently, we consider this a medium-to-low impact severity.
See CVE-2025-61727 for a similar bypass in Go's crypto/x509.
Remediation
Users should upgrade to 46.0.6 or newer.
Attribution
Reporter: @1seal
Affected software
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| Platform | Package | Vulnerable versions | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Python (PyPI) | cryptography | < 46.0.6 | 46.0.6 |
References
- CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N- Weakness (CWE)
CWE-295- Platform
- Python (PyPI)
- Package
cryptography- Disclosed
- 27.03.2026
- Updated
- 11.10.2026 15:17
Sources and licenses
OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - PYSEC-2026-35 - PyPA Advisory Database; CC BY 4.0
OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - GHSA-m959-cc7f-wv43 - CC BY 4.0
Vulnerability history: cryptography
All published vulnerabilities of this package (Python (PyPI)), newest first. Shows whether this is a one-off slip or a package that needs watching.
- Total entries
- 24
- First → latest
- 03.2017 08.2026
- Without a fix
- 0
- Exploited in attacks
- 0
Severity breakdown
- High 12
- Medium 7
- Low 5
Disclosures per year
- 2017: 1
- 2018: 1
- 2019: 0
- 2020: 1
- 2021: 1
- 2022: 1
- 2023: 7
- 2024: 4
- 2025: 1
- 2026: 7
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