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Security-only OpenSSL tarball releases for CVE-2026-2673

On Friday May the 13th OpenSSL project has published advisory details for CVE-2026-2673. The CVE is treated as non-important by the project. The patches are only provided as commits on the stable branches. No git tag, no precise fixed version, and no source tarballs provided.

The patches that were merged to openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches were not based on top of the last stable point release and did not split code changes & documentation updates. It means that cherry-picking the commits referenced in the advisory will always lead to conflicts requiring manual resolution. It is not clear if support is provided for snapshot builds off the openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches. As the builds from the stable branches declare themselves as dev builds of the next unreleased point release. For example, in contrast to projects such as vim and glibc, with every commit to stable branches explicitly recommended for distributors to ship and is supported.

I have requested OpenSSL upstream in the past for the security fixes to branch off the last point release, commit code changes separate from the NEWS.md / CHANGES.md updates, and then merge that into the stable branches. This way the advisory that recommends cherry-picking individual commits, would actually apply conflict free - at no additional maintenance burden to the OpenSSL project and everyone who has to cherry-pick these updates. There is a wide support voiced for such strategy by the OpenSSL distributors and the OpenSSL Corporation. But this is not something that OpenSSL Project is yet choosing to provide.

To avoid duplication of work, I am starting to provide stable OpenSSL re-releases of the last upstream tagged stable point release with security only patches split into code-change only; documentation update; version update to create security only source tarball releases that are easy to build; easy to identify by the security scanners; and which cherry-pick changes without conflicts. The first two releases are published on GitHub as immutable releases with attestations:

If there are any other branches, CVEs, point releases that would be useful for similar style releases, do open discussion on the GitHub Project.

If you find these releases useful, do star the project and download these releases. If this project gets popular, I hope that OpenSSL upstream will reconsider their releases strategy for all security releases. If you have support contracts with OpenSSL - please request OpenSSL corporation to release tagged releases and versioned tarballs.

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