If an X.509 certificate contains a malformed policy constraint and policy processing is enabled, then a write lock will be taken twice recursively. On some operating systems (most widely: Windows) this results in a denial of service when the affected process hangs. Policy processing being enabled on a publicly facing server is not considered to be a common setup.
Policy processing is enabled by passing the -policy'
argument to the command line utilities or by calling the
X509VERIFYPARAMset1policies()' function.
Update (31 March 2023): The description of the policy processing enablement was corrected based on CVE-2023-0466.