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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.3

CVE-2026-97873 json

Legacy PBES1 and PKCS#12 PBE iteration count honoured unbounded in the raw JCA provider

published 2026-10-03 36 d ago modified 2026-10-06 33 d ago also EUVD-2026-91987

cvss
5.3
version 4.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 18%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-JAVA 1.86
  • Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-LTS-JAVA 2.73.13
  • bouncycastle Debian 14 1.86-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-97873

  • bouncycastle SLES for SAP applications 16.0, SLES 16.0 1.86-160000.1.1
  • bouncycastle SLES for SAP 15 SP6, SLES for SAP 15 SP5, SLES for SAP 15 SP4 +8 more 1.86-150200.3.41.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2026:24461-1SUSE-SU-2026:4797-1

  • bouncycastle openSUSE Leap 16.0 1.86-160000.1.1
  • bouncycastle openSUSE Tumbleweed 1.86-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:22169-1openSUSE-SU-2026:12090-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-97873 updated cvss 5.3

org.bouncycastle:bcprov-jdk18on: org.bouncycastle:bcprov-lts8on: bouncycastle: org.bouncycastle:bcprov-jdk15on: bouncycastle: Denial of Service via unbounded iteration count in password-based encrypti

  • Red Hat OpenShift Developer Tools and Services ocp-tools-4/jenkins-rhel8, ocp-tools-4/jenkins-rhel9 Red Hat AMQ Broker 7 bcprov-jdk18on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 ansible-automation-platform-27/de-minimal-rhel9, ansible-automation-platform-27/de-supported-rhel9 Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4 for Quarkus 3 bcprov-jdk18on Red Hat build of Apache Camel for Spring Boot 4 bcprov-jdk18on Red Hat build of Apicurio Registry 3 bcprov-lts8on
    +10 more products
    Red Hat Build of Keycloak bcprov-jdk18on, rhbk/keycloak-rhel9 Red Hat build of Quarkus bcprov-jdk18on Red Hat Fuse 7 bcprov-jdk15on, bcprov-jdk18on Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7 bcprov-jdk15on, bcprov-jdk18on, jboss-eap-7/eap74-els-openjdk8-openshift-rhel8, jboss-eap-7/eap74-els-openjdk11-openshift-rhel8, jboss-eap-7/eap74-els-openjdk17-openshift-rhel8 Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 8 bcprov-jdk18on Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Expansion Pack bcprov-jdk18on Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) rhoai/odh-modelmesh-rhel9, rhoai/odh-spark-operator-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th06-cpu-torch210-py312-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th06-cpu-torch291-py312-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th06-rocm64-torch291-py312-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th06-cuda130-torch210-py312-rhel9, +1 more Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces devspaces/openvsx-rhel9, devspaces/jetbrains-ide-rhel9, devspaces/pluginregistry-rhel9 Red Hat Satellite 6 candlepin, candlepin-selinux Red Hat Single Sign-On 7 bcprov-jdk18on
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat OpenShift Developer Tools and Services jenkins, jenkins-2-plugins Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 resteasy, resteasy-javadoc Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 jmc, resteasy, pki-resteasy-core, pki-resteasy-client, pki-resteasy-jackson2-provider, pki-resteasy-servlet-initializer
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
34 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.26% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 18% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 4.0 5.3 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
CNA 4.0 5.3 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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:Amber

Affected products

  • Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-JAVA
  • Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-LTS-JAVA

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

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.