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CVE-2026-103603

high

Memory allocation with excessive size value in the HSS/LMS signature code (HssPublicKeyParameters, HssSignature) in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.

Vendor / product: Bouncycastle — bc-csharp

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.

CVSS
7.5
7.5 (CVSS v3.1)
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Severity source: NVD CVSS v3.1 (nvd@nist.gov)
Timeline (UTC)
Published: 2026-10-02 08:17
Modified: 2026-10-28 13:29
NVD status: Analyzed
Last synced 1 day ago
Verified against the source API 2026-10-28 13:34 UTC
Exploitation
Not listed in CISA KEV (as of last catalog sync)
Absence from KEV does not mean a CVE is not exploited. Exploitation status: unknown (no authoritative evidence in our sources).

Affected products

bouncycastle / bc-csharp <2.7.0

Weakness classification (CWE)

Source: NVD / CISA. “NVD-CWE-Other” and “NVD-CWE-noinfo” mean NVD could not assign a specific weakness.

Mitigation & advisories

Vendor advisory: https://github.com/bcgit/bc-csharp/wiki/CVE-2026-103603
Patch / mitigation: https://github.com/bcgit/bc-csharp/commit/f47ad47c7b5745b53d3f9ac711a5a419a272a5d7
Patch / mitigation: https://github.com/bcgit/bc-csharp/wiki/CVE-2026-103603

References

Data sources

NVD CVE API 2.0 — fetched 2026-10-28 13:34 UTC · record ↗

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