Bug 2553500

Summary: CVE-2026-18040 bouncycastle: bouncycastle: Information disclosure via cryptographic side channels in HQC [fedora-all]
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Joel Chamberlain <jochambe>
Component: bouncycastleAssignee: Mat Booth <mat.booth>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: rawhideCC: mat.booth, mattias.ellert
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security, SecurityTracking
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Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard: {"flaws": ["c20565fc-dd74-40e7-b662-0d9e21960f41"]}
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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: 2545501    

Description Joel Chamberlain 2026-10-15 14:51:18 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, HQC leaked secret-derived data through two side channels: its GF(2^8) arithmetic used lookup tables indexed by field elements, making the cache line touched a function of the operand, and its fixed-weight support sampler left its duplicate scan as soon as a collision was found and stored accepted positions at a secret index. Both run on secret inputs during encapsulation and decapsulation, and the sampler re-expands the secret key from its seed on every decapsulation, so an attacker able to observe cache behaviour or decapsulation timing can recover information about the HQC private key. The field arithmetic is now table-free and the sampler branch-free within a batch of candidates, with output and randomness consumption unchanged.