Bug 2545144

Summary: CVE-2026-18036 bouncycastle: bouncycastle: Information disclosure via timing side-channel in NTRU [epel-10]
Product: [Fedora] Fedora EPEL Reporter: Vladimir Vasilev <vvasilev>
Component: bouncycastleAssignee: Gianluca Sforna <giallu>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: epel10CC: giallu, mat.booth, mattias.ellert
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security, SecurityTracking
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Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard: {"flaws": ["eae453aa-67de-41d2-bf29-478e9a345e94"]}
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 2544959    

Description Vladimir Vasilev 2026-10-02 12:26:25 UTC
Disclaimer: Community trackers are created by Red Hat Product Security team on a best effort basis. Package maintainers are required to ascertain if the flaw indeed affects their package, before starting the update process.

In Bouncy Castle for Java before 1.86, NTRU reduced secret values with the % operator in three helpers whose reference implementations are deliberately division-free, so each reduction was carried out by an integer division whose latency depends on the secret operand. Polynomial.modQ divided by a variable divisor, which a compiler cannot strength-reduce to a multiply the way it can a constant one, so it emitted a division on every call including on the decapsulation path where the dividend derives from the private key; Polynomial.mod3 and NTRUSampling.mod3 divided the secret key polynomials f and g during key generation, the message polynomials r and m during encapsulation, and coefficients recovered during decapsulation. An attacker able to measure that timing can recover information about the NTRU private key. modQ now masks, which is exact because q is always a power of two, and mod3 uses the reference implementation's division-free fold and select; the results are unchanged.