BouncycastleCVEs & Vulnerabilities

Bouncy Castle for Java before 1.73 contains a potential Denial of Service (DoS) issue within the Bouncy Castle org.bouncycastle.openssl.PEMParser class. This class parses OpenSSL PEM encoded streams containing X.509 certificates, PKCS8 encoded keys, and PKCS7 objects. Parsing a file that has crafted ASN.1 data through the PEMParser causes an OutOfMemoryError, which can enable a denial of service attack. (For users of the FIPS Java API: BC-FJA 1.0.2.3 and earlier are affected; BC-FJA 1.0.2.4 is fixed.)

Bouncy Castle For Java before 1.74 is affected by an LDAP injection vulnerability. The vulnerability only affects applications that use an LDAP CertStore from Bouncy Castle to validate X.509 certificates. During the certificate validation process, Bouncy Castle inserts the certificate's Subject Name into an LDAP search filter without any escaping, which leads to an LDAP injection vulnerability.

An issue was discovered in the FIPS Java API of Bouncy Castle BC-FJA before 1.0.2.4. Changes to the JVM garbage collector in Java 13 and later trigger an issue in the BC-FJA FIPS modules where it is possible for temporary keys used by the module to be zeroed out while still in use by the module, resulting in errors or potential information loss. NOTE: FIPS compliant users are unaffected because the FIPS certification is only for Java 7, 8, and 11.

Bouncy Castle BC Java before 1.66, BC C# .NET before 1.8.7, BC-FJA before 1.0.1.2, 1.0.2.1, and BC-FNA before 1.0.1.1 have a timing issue within the EC math library that can expose information about the private key when an attacker is able to observe timing information for the generation of multiple deterministic ECDSA signatures.

An issue was discovered in Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC Java 1.65 and 1.66. The OpenBSDBCrypt.checkPassword utility method compared incorrect data when checking the password, allowing incorrect passwords to indicate they were matching with previously hashed ones that were different.

In Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC before 1.61 and BC-FJA before 1.0.1.2, attackers can obtain sensitive information about a private exponent because of Observable Differences in Behavior to Error Inputs. This occurs in org.bouncycastle.crypto.encodings.OAEPEncoding. Sending invalid ciphertext that decrypts to a short payload in the OAEP Decoder could result in the throwing of an early exception, potentially leaking some information about the private exponent of the RSA private key performing the encryption.

The ASN.1 parser in Bouncy Castle Crypto (aka BC Java) 1.63 can trigger a large attempted memory allocation, and resultant OutOfMemoryError error, via crafted ASN.1 data. This is fixed in 1.64.

Legion of the Bouncy Castle Legion of the Bouncy Castle Java Cryptography APIs 1.58 up to but not including 1.60 contains a CWE-470: Use of Externally-Controlled Input to Select Classes or Code ('Unsafe Reflection') vulnerability in XMSS/XMSS^MT private key deserialization that can result in Deserializing an XMSS/XMSS^MT private key can result in the execution of unexpected code. This attack appear to be exploitable via A handcrafted private key can include references to unexpected classes which will be picked up from the class path for the executing application. This vulnerability appears to have been fixed in 1.60 and later.

Bouncy Castle BC 1.54 - 1.59, BC-FJA 1.0.0, BC-FJA 1.0.1 and earlier have a flaw in the Low-level interface to RSA key pair generator, specifically RSA Key Pairs generated in low-level API with added certainty may have less M-R tests than expected. This appears to be fixed in versions BC 1.60 beta 4 and later, BC-FJA 1.0.2 and later.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the ECIES implementation allowed the use of ECB mode. This mode is regarded as unsafe and support for it has been removed from the provider.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the other party DH public key is not fully validated. This can cause issues as invalid keys can be used to reveal details about the other party's private key where static Diffie-Hellman is in use. As of release 1.56 the key parameters are checked on agreement calculation.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the DHIES/ECIES CBC mode vulnerable to padding oracle attack. For BC 1.55 and older, in an environment where timings can be easily observed, it is possible with enough observations to identify when the decryption is failing due to padding.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the DHIES implementation allowed the use of ECB mode. This mode is regarded as unsafe and support for it has been removed from the provider.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the DSA key pair generator generates a weak private key if used with default values. If the JCA key pair generator is not explicitly initialised with DSA parameters, 1.55 and earlier generates a private value assuming a 1024 bit key size. In earlier releases this can be dealt with by explicitly passing parameters to the key pair generator.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier ECDSA does not fully validate ASN.1 encoding of signature on verification. It is possible to inject extra elements in the sequence making up the signature and still have it validate, which in some cases may allow the introduction of 'invisible' data into a signed structure.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier DSA signature generation is vulnerable to timing attack. Where timings can be closely observed for the generation of signatures, the lack of blinding in 1.55, or earlier, may allow an attacker to gain information about the signature's k value and ultimately the private value as well.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider versions 1.51 to 1.55, a carry propagation bug was introduced in the implementation of squaring for several raw math classes have been fixed (org.bouncycastle.math.raw.Nat???). These classes are used by our custom elliptic curve implementations (org.bouncycastle.math.ec.custom.**), so there was the possibility of rare (in general usage) spurious calculations for elliptic curve scalar multiplications. Such errors would have been detected with high probability by the output validation for our scalar multipliers.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the primary engine class used for AES was AESFastEngine. Due to the highly table driven approach used in the algorithm it turns out that if the data channel on the CPU can be monitored the lookup table accesses are sufficient to leak information on the AES key being used. There was also a leak in AESEngine although it was substantially less. AESEngine has been modified to remove any signs of leakage (testing carried out on Intel X86-64) and is now the primary AES class for the BC JCE provider from 1.56. Use of AESFastEngine is now only recommended where otherwise deemed appropriate.

In Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the DSA does not fully validate ASN.1 encoding of signature on verification. It is possible to inject extra elements in the sequence making up the signature and still have it validate, which in some cases may allow the introduction of 'invisible' data into a signed structure.

The default BKS keystore use an HMAC that is only 16 bits long, which can allow an attacker to compromise the integrity of a BKS keystore. Bouncy Castle release 1.47 changes the BKS format to a format which uses a 160 bit HMAC instead. This applies to any BKS keystore generated prior to BC 1.47. For situations where people need to create the files for legacy reasons a specific keystore type "BKS-V1" was introduced in 1.49. It should be noted that the use of "BKS-V1" is discouraged by the library authors and should only be used where it is otherwise safe to do so, as in where the use of a 16 bit checksum for the file integrity check is not going to cause a security issue in itself.

BouncyCastle TLS prior to version 1.0.3, when configured to use the JCE (Java Cryptography Extension) for cryptographic functions, provides a weak Bleichenbacher oracle when any TLS cipher suite using RSA key exchange is negotiated. An attacker can recover the private key from a vulnerable application. This vulnerability is referred to as "ROBOT."

The AES-GCM specification in RFC 5084, as used in Android 5.x and 6.x, recommends 12 octets for the aes-ICVlen parameter field, which might make it easier for attackers to defeat a cryptographic protection mechanism and discover an authentication key via a crafted application, aka internal bug 26234568. NOTE: The vendor disputes the existence of this potential issue in Android, stating "This CVE was raised in error: it referred to the authentication tag size in GCM, whose default according to ASN.1 encoding (12 bytes) can lead to vulnerabilities. After careful consideration, it was decided that the insecure default value of 12 bytes was a default only for the encoding and not default anywhere else in Android, and hence no vulnerability existed.

The Bouncy Castle Java library before 1.51 does not validate a point is withing the elliptic curve, which makes it easier for remote attackers to obtain private keys via a series of crafted elliptic curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) key exchanges, aka an "invalid curve attack."

The TLS implementation in the Bouncy Castle Java library before 1.48 and C# library before 1.8 does not properly consider timing side-channel attacks on a noncompliant MAC check operation during the processing of malformed CBC padding, which allows remote attackers to conduct distinguishing attacks and plaintext-recovery attacks via statistical analysis of timing data for crafted packets, a related issue to CVE-2013-0169.

The Legion of the Bouncy Castle Java Cryptography API before release 1.38, as used in Crypto Provider Package before 1.36, has unknown impact and remote attack vectors related to "a Bleichenbacher vulnerability in simple RSA CMS signatures without signed attributes."