NULL Pointer DereferenceWeakness · CWE-476

CVE-2026-73502

MEDIUM · 5.3 CVSS v3.1 Published 2026-08-18
No fix yet
No fix has been published. The vendor has not shipped a fixed release or patch. You remain exposed.
See remediation →
62/100
Remediation priority · Elevated
Remotely reachable No privileges Zero-click Brand new

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
kin-openapi is a Go project for handling OpenAPI files. From 0.2.0 until 0.144.0, openapi3filter.ValidateRequest can encounter a NULL-pointer-dereference denial of service when an operation declares a content parameter whose application/json media type has no schema. In openapi3filter/req_resp_decoder.go, the default defaultContentParameterDecoder dereferences mt.Schema.Value without checking whether mt.Schema is nil, even though doc.Validate() accepts the document under OpenAPI 3.0.x and 3.1.x. A single unauthenticated request supplying the parameter value can panic request validation, causing an aborted request with log growth in the common synchronous net/http path or a full process crash in integrations without recovery. This issue is fixed in version 0.144.0.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-476

The code follows a pointer that is null, crashing the process. An attacker who can reliably trigger it turns the crash into a denial of service. The fix is checking for null before use and handling the failure path gracefully.

General guidance for the null pointer dereference class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Recommended fix High confidence

0.144.0

  1. Update the kin-openapi dependency in go.mod to version 0.144.0 or later (e.g., change the version to v0.144.0)
  2. Run `go mod tidy` or `go get github.com/getkin/[email protected]` to update the dependency
  3. Rebuild and redeploy the application
  4. Verify the fix by testing request validation with a content parameter that has an application/json media type without a schema

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

No vendor fix exists The vendor has not published a patch for this.

There is no version to upgrade to and no patch to apply. Every affected install stays exposed until the vendor ships a fix — or somebody else builds one.

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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2026-73502 in production — separate from our analysis above.

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