CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-103603

HighCVSS 8.7
Published: Translated: NVD NIST

Summary

Memory allocation with excessive size value in the HSS/LMS signature code (HssPublicKeyParameters, HssSignature) in Bouncy Castle for .NET (bc-csharp) before 2.7.0 allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service through memory exhaustion via a public key encoding with an excessive level count (L), leading to allocation of an array of size L-1 and memory exhaustion (up to ~17 GB) or OutOfMemoryException.

Risk Assessment

A remote unauthenticated attacker can cause a denial of service through memory exhaustion during HSS signature verification. This may lead to application or system crash.

Recommendation

Update the Bouncy Castle for .NET (bc-csharp) library to version 2.7.0 or later. In the new version, the level count is checked against the RFC 8554 maximum of 8.

Other vulnerabilities in Bouncy Castle (bc-csharp)

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Original NVD description (English source)

Memory allocation with excessive size value in the HSS/LMS signature code (HssPublicKeyParameters, HssSignature) in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp before 2.7.0 allows a remote unauthenticated attacker who can supply both an HSS public key and a signature to cause a denial of service through memory exhaustion via a public key encoding with an excessive level count, because the level count L read when parsing an HSS public key was not checked against the RFC 8554 maximum of 8, and signature parsing then allocated an array of L - 1 entries before reading any further signature data. A single verification can commit up to about 17 GB of memory or fail with an OutOfMemoryException.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS