CVE-2026-93599

rustls-webpki before 0.103.13 Panic via empty BIT STRING

Reported by vulncheck · Published September 18, 2026

rustls-webpki is fixed in 0.104.0-alpha.7, 0.104.0-alpha.1 and 0.103.13 (crates.io)

rustls-webpki through 0.103.12 (and 0.104.0-alpha releases before 0.104.0-alpha.7) contains a reachable panic in bit_string_flags() in src/der.rs. The input guard fails to reject a named-bit BIT STRING whose content is exactly [0x00] (zero padding bits and no data bytes), so raw_bits.len() - 1 underflows on the empty slice and the subsequent index operation panics (subtract-with-overflow in debug, index-out-of-bounds in release). The condition is reachable through the public API BorrowedCertRevocationList::from_der() when a CRL contains an issuingDistributionPoint extension with such an onlySomeReasons value. Exploitation requires an application that explicitly opts in to CRL revocation checking by passing RevocationOptions to verify_for_usage() and that parses CRL bytes obtained from a source the attacker can influence; the default rustls configuration, which does not use RevocationOptions, is unaffected. A crafted CRL causes a denial of service via the panic. Fixed in 0.103.13 and 0.104.0-alpha.7.