CVE-2025-53627

Meshtastic firmware allows forged DMs with no PKC to show up as encrypted

State
Published
Severity
5.3 Medium
Published
Dec 29, 2025
Updated
Dec 29, 2025
Reserved
Jul 7, 2025

Read the record on cve.org

Description

Meshtastic is an open source mesh networking solution. The Meshtastic firmware (starting from version 2.5) introduces asymmetric encryption (PKI) for direct messages, but when the `pki_encrypted` flag is missing, the firmware silently falls back to legacy AES-256-CTR channel encryption. This was an intentional decision to maintain backwards compatibility. However, the end-user applications, like Web app, iOS/Android app, and applications built on top of Meshtastic using the SDK, did not have a way to differentiate between end-to-end encrypted DMs and the legacy DMs. This creates a downgrade attack path where adversaries who know a shared channel key can craft and inject spoofed direct messages that are displayed as if they were PKC encrypted. Users are not given any feedback of whether a direct message was decrypted with PKI or with legacy symmetric encryption, undermining the expected security guarantees of the PKI rollout. Version 2.7.15 fixes this issue.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.15.3 MediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:NGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-1287 Improper Validation of Specified Type of Input

Affected Products

ProductVersions
firmwaremeshtastic
  • >= 2.5, < 2.7.15Affected

References

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