Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Bouncy Castle for Java - CVE-2026-17508

Vulnerability details

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to perform a denial of service (DoS) attack.

The vulnerability exists due to several password-based key derivation entry points ran the KDF with cost parameters taken from the untrusted input being processed, without bounding them, so a small input could dictate an arbitrary amount of work before any password or integrity check could reject it. A remote attacker can trigger resource exhaustion and perform a denial of service (DoS) attack.

Affected software

How to mitigate CVE-2026-17508

External References

• https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/commit/20ed9e203caec91d25cd386ceb6d364e9b068f67
• https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/commit/442393bf187c914b1e66fbed4fab532a1fe06c6a
• https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/commit/480d878aa6f7dc8b20403064f304bbe0decbbb1a
• https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/commit/766a31026ac24ed3c6cad8662058ba450c338da1
• https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/commit/882fdab53f6c4c150a5d6a4e6ef1fc05d382385a
• https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/commit/e72bc0681ff4227fced912ef7394daf7b7d57bb3
• https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/wiki/CVE%E2%80%902026%E2%80%9017508

Related Security Bulletins

• Allocation of resources without limits or throttling in Bouncy Castle for Java
• Multiple vulnerabilities in IBM BigMemory Max