CVE-2026-97873: medium-severity vulnerability in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-JAVA
Legacy PBES1 and PKCS#12 PBE iteration count honoured unbounded in the raw JCA provider
Published · Updated
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 5.3epss 0.3%
exploitation probability
0.3%top 83% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
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.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/U:Amber
Affected products
Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. · BC-JAVALegion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. · BC-LTS-JAVARelated CVEs — Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-JAVA
In the same product, most dangerous first.
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