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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.3

CVE-2025-53627 json

Meshtastic firmware allows forged DMs with no PKC to show up as encrypted

published 2025-12-29 10 mo ago modified 2026-10-07 33 d ago also EUVD-2025-205605

cvss
5.3
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 9%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Meshtastic is an open source mesh networking solution. The Meshtastic firmware (starting from version 2.5) introduces asymmetric encryption (PKI) for direct messages, but when the `pki_encrypted` flag is missing, the firmware silently falls back to legacy AES-256-CTR channel encryption. This was an intentional decision to maintain backwards compatibility. However, the end-user applications, like Web app, iOS/Android app, and applications built on top of Meshtastic using the SDK, did not have a way to differentiate between end-to-end encrypted DMs and the legacy DMs. This creates a downgrade attack path where adversaries who know a shared channel key can craft and inject spoofed direct messages that are displayed as if they were PKC encrypted. Users are not given any feedback of whether a direct message was decrypted with PKI or with legacy symmetric encryption, undermining the expected security guarantees of the PKI rollout. Version 2.7.15 fixes this issue.

Patch / fix

  • meshtastic meshtastic_firmware 2.7.15

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
10 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.20% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 9% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/security/advisories/GHSA-377p-prwp-4hwf referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

Affected products

  • meshtastic firmware

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-1287 Improper Validation of Specified Type of Input

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.