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
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
| CVSS | Score | Vector | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | 5.3 Medium | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N | GitHub_M |
Weaknesses
- CWE-1287 Improper Validation of Specified Type of Input
Affected Products
| Product | Versions |
|---|---|
firmwaremeshtastic |
|
References
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