CVE-2026-97873

Legacy PBES1 and PKCS#12 PBE iteration count honoured unbounded in the raw JCA provider

State
Published
Severity
5.3 Medium
Published
Oct 3, 2026
Updated
Oct 5, 2026
Reserved
Sep 25, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

In Bouncy Castle for Java before 1.86, the raw JCA provider's legacy PBES1 (PKCS#5 scheme 1) and PKCS#12 PBE families ran their password-based key derivation with an iteration count taken from untrusted input without bounding it, so a small input could dictate an arbitrary amount of work before anything could be verified. The AlgorithmParameters implementations (PKCS12PBE and its object identifier aliases, and PBKDF1) accepted any count from an encoded PKCS12PBEParams or PBEParameter, narrowing a value beyond the int range with intValue(), and every Cipher, Mac and SecretKeyFactory in these families derived with whatever count it was given, including one decoded by another provider's AlgorithmParameters, as when javax.crypto.EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo.getKeySpec() decrypts a PKCS#12 PBE-protected private key with BC. Both the parameter parse and the derivations now reject a negative or over-limit count under the org.bouncycastle.pbe.max_iteration_count property (default 10,000,000) that already bounded PBKDF2 (CVE-2026-17508), and the parse rejects a count beyond the int range rather than narrowing it. This issue also affects Bouncy Castle for Java LTS before 2.73.13.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.05.3 MediumCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/U:Amberbcorg

Weaknesses

  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Affected Products

ProductVersions
BC-JAVALegion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.
  • before 1.86Affected
BC-LTS-JAVALegion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.
  • 2.73.0 to before 2.73.13Affected

References

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