CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-45445

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.33%

24th percentile - higher than 24% of all known CVEs

Summary

CVE-2026-45445 vulnerability concerns the AES-OCB context where the application-supplied initialization vector (IV) is ignored. This leads to key and nonce reuse, jeopardizing data confidentiality.

Risk Assessment

Organizations may experience loss of data confidentiality as attackers can forge arbitrary ciphertext from a single captured message. Exploiting this vulnerability could lead to serious security breaches.

Recommendation

It is recommended that applications use the documented streaming interface (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) instead of EVP_Cipher() to avoid this vulnerability. Existing implementations should also be reviewed to identify potential risks.

Original NVD description (English source)

Issue summary: When an application drives an AES-OCB context through the public EVP_Cipher() one-shot interface, the application-supplied initialisation vector (IV) is silently discarded. Impact summary: Every message encrypted under the same key uses the same effective nonce regardless of the IV supplied by the caller, resulting in (key, nonce) reuse and loss of confidentiality. If the same code path is used to compute the authentication tag, the tag depends only on the (key, IV) pair and not on the plaintext or ciphertext, allowing universal forgery of arbitrary ciphertext from a single captured message. OpenSSL provides two ways to drive a cipher: the documented streaming interface (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) and a lower-level one-shot, EVP_Cipher(), whose documentation explicitly recommends against use by applications in favour of EVP_CipherUpdate() and EVP_CipherFinal_ex(). The OCB provider's streaming handler flushes the application-supplied IV into the OCB context before processing data; the one-shot handler did not. Every call to EVP_Cipher() on an AES-OCB context therefore ran with the all-zero key-derived offset state left by cipher initialisation, regardless of the caller's IV. If EVP_EncryptFinal_ex() is subsequently used to obtain the authentication tag, the deferred IV setup runs at that point and clears the running checksum that should have been accumulated over the plaintext. The resulting tag is a function of (key, IV) only and verifies against any ciphertext produced under the same (key, IV) pair. The OpenSSL SSL/TLS implementation is not affected: AES-OCB is not a TLS cipher suite, and libssl does not call EVP_Cipher() in any case. Applications that drive AES-OCB through the documented streaming AEAD API (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) are not affected. Only applications that combine the AES-OCB cipher with the EVP_Cipher() one-shot API are vulnerable. The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as AES-OCB is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

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