Bug 2550552 - CVE-2026-97873 bouncycastle: bouncycastle: Denial of Service via unbounded iteration count in password-based encryption [fedora-all]
Summary: CVE-2026-97873 bouncycastle: bouncycastle: Denial of Service via unbounded it...
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: bouncycastle
Version: rawhide
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Mat Booth
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard: {"flaws": ["aa314cee-26a8-4888-85f4-5...
Depends On:
Blocks: CVE-2026-97873
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2026-10-13 14:11 UTC by Joel Chamberlain
Modified: 2026-10-13 14:11 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed:
Type: ---
Embargoed:


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Description Joel Chamberlain 2026-10-13 14:11:59 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, 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.


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