CVE-2026-71892: medium-severity vulnerability in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-FJA
CMS key-transport recipient key-size validation never runs for RFC 9709 HKDF-derived keys
Published · Updated
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6.9epss 0.2%
exploitation probability
0.2%top 94% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
In Bouncy Castle for Java before 1.86, the opt-in key-size validation on CMS key-transport recipients, org.bouncycastle.cms.jcajce.JceKeyTransRecipient.setKeySizeValidation(true), never ran for a message using RFC 9709 content-encryption key derivation (id-alg-cek-hkdf-sha256). The branch that should have selected the actual content-encryption algorithm carried in the key derivation AlgorithmIdentifier's parameters compared the encrypted-key byte array against the id-alg-cek-hkdf-sha256 object identifier, a comparison between a byte array and an ASN1ObjectIdentifier that is false for every possible input, so the check fell through to a key-size lookup on the outer wrapper OID. That OID identifies a key-derivation construction rather than a cipher and has no registered key size, so the size comparison was skipped entirely. A key-transport EnvelopedData or AuthEnvelopedData whose transported, HKDF-derived content-encryption key did not match the key size of the advertised content-encryption algorithm was therefore accepted even with validation explicitly enabled, silently defeating the only mechanism the API offers for enforcing recovered key size. The recipient now dispatches on the content-encryption AlgorithmIdentifier's algorithm OID, so validation checks the recovered key against the inner content-encryption algorithm. Messages with a matching key size, non-HKDF messages, and recipients that do not enable validation are unaffected. This issue also affects Bouncy Castle for Java FIPS (BC-FJA) before bcpkix-fips 2.0.13 (2.0.X series) and 2.1.13 (2.1.X series).
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/U:Amber
Affected products
Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. · BC-FJALegion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. · BC-JAVARelated CVEs — Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-FJA
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-5598HIGHNon-constant time comparisons risk private key leakage in FrodoKEM.EPSS 1.0%CVE-2026-3505HIGHUnbounded PGP AEAD chunk size leads to pre-auth resource exhaustion.EPSS 0.9%CVE-2026-5588MEDIUMPKIX draft CompositeVerifier accepts empty signature sequence as valid.EPSS 0.7%CVE-2026-58060HIGHHSS public-key level count unbounded, enabling huge allocation on verifyEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-59646HIGHDTLS handshake reassembler allocates buffer from unchecked 24-bit lengthEPSS 0.6%CVE-2025-8885MEDIUMPossible DOS in processing specially formed ASN.1 Object IdentifiersEPSS 0.5%