CVE-2026-69249: python-cryptography: Duplicate self-signed intermediates can cause exponential path-building

When resolving invalid certificate chains that include duplicate copies of self-signed certificates, the processing recursively invokes the same candidate, leading to an exponential blowup. Although the limitation that the chain depth cannot exceed a specified maximum depth prevents unbounded recursion and guarantees termination, an attacker-controlled certificate chain can lead the processing to easily take more than 5s to reject in testing. This amplification could form the basis for a resource exhaustion denial of service attack.

This work was completed by Trail of Bits as part of the Patch The Planet project in collaboration with OpenAI. The finding was identified primarily by the Codex coding agent, and manually reviewed before submission.