CVE-2026-87018: undici vulnerable to Denial of Service via TLS 1.2 certificate-changing renegotiation

undici crashes the client process when a TLS 1.2 server renegotiates after the connection is established and presents a different, CA-trusted certificate whose hostname does not match the requested host. Node.js re-runs hostname verification on the renegotiated handshake and destroys the socket with ERR_TLS_CERT_ALTNAME_INVALID. undici’s established socket error handler asserted that this error code could never occur, so the peer-controlled error became an uncaught AssertionError that terminates the Node.js process. Both the HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 paths are affected.

A malicious or compromised HTTPS endpoint reached through undici or the global fetch() can crash the client with a single server-initiated renegotiation, taking down all in-flight requests and background work in the process. Only TLS 1.2 is affected, because TLS 1.3 does not support renegotiation. Exploitation does not require a CA compromise: the attacker controls the endpoint and can present two ordinary valid certificates, the first matching the requested URL and the second intentionally not matching it.