CVE-2026-97873

NameCVE-2026-97873
DescriptionIn 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.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
bouncycastle (PTS)bookworm1.72-2vulnerable
trixie1.80-3vulnerable
forky, sid1.86-1fixed

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
bouncycastlesource(unstable)1.86-1

Notes

https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/wiki/CVE%E2%80%902026%E2%80%9097873
Fixed by: https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/commit/766a31026ac24ed3c6cad8662058ba450c338da1 (r1rv86)

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