Severity by source
AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Network-reachable and unauthenticated (PR:N); forgery needs the non-default small-exponent condition, giving AC:H; impersonation yields C:H/I:H and daemon-abort DoS gives A:H.
Primary rating from Vendor (libreswan).
CVSS VectorNVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Lifecycle Timeline
7DescriptionNVD
Libreswan, via the function RSA_authenticate_hash_signature_pkcs1_1_5_rsa(), did not correctly verify the DER encoding of the ASN.1 digest when the IKEv2 AUTH payload was encoded using RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 (RFC 8017). A remote attacker can use a variation on the Bleichenbacher attack to forge the AUTH payload when small public exponents are used (e.g., e=3), leading to impersonation. Additionally, a remote attacker, by encoding a shorter than expected hash in the AUTH payload, could trigger an assertion leading to denial-of-service. The daemon aborts and restarts; continued exploitation causes sustained denial of service. Remote code execution is not possible. X.509 certificate verifications of the remote IKE peer are not affected.
AnalysisAI
Peer impersonation and denial-of-service in Libreswan IPsec/IKEv2 arises from improper DER/ASN.1 digest verification in RSA_authenticate_hash_signature_pkcs1_1_5_rsa() when the IKEv2 AUTH payload uses RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 signatures. A remote unauthenticated attacker can mount a Bleichenbacher-style forgery to impersonate a peer when small RSA public exponents (e.g., e=3) are in use, or send an undersized hash to trip an assertion that aborts and restarts the daemon for sustained DoS. A vendor patch is available and there is no public exploit identified at time of analysis; RCE is not possible and X.509 certificate verification of the peer is unaffected.
Technical ContextAI
Libreswan is an open-source IKE/IPsec VPN daemon (a Openswan/FreeS/WAN descendant) widely used on Linux to establish IKEv2 security associations. The flaw is in its verification of RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 signatures (RFC 8017 / PKCS#1 v1.5) carried in the IKEv2 AUTH payload during peer authentication. The root cause maps to CWE-347 (Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature): the code failed to strictly validate the DER encoding of the ASN.1 DigestInfo structure wrapping the hash, allowing extra bytes to be smuggled around the hash. This is the classic precondition for a Bleichenbacher low-exponent signature-forgery attack, where a cube-root can be crafted into a value that passes a lax parser as a valid e=3 signature. The affected component is only the raw-RSA-signature AUTH path; the separate X.509 certificate chain verification of the remote peer is explicitly not affected.
RemediationAI
Apply the vendor-released Libreswan patch published at https://libreswan.org/security/CVE-2026-50722/ and detailed in the advisory https://libreswan.org/security/CVE-2026-50722/CVE-2026-50722.txt (upgrade to the fixed release once the exact version is confirmed from that advisory, as the input does not name a specific fix version). Until patched, mitigate the impersonation path by avoiding small RSA public exponents (do not use e=3 keys; use e=65537) and, where feasible, migrate peer authentication from raw RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 signatures to X.509 certificate-based authentication (unaffected) or to stronger signature schemes - with the trade-off of coordinated configuration changes on both peers. For the DoS path, restrict IKE reachability by firewalling UDP/500 and UDP/4500 to known VPN peer addresses so untrusted hosts cannot send crafted AUTH payloads, accepting that this only helps where peer IPs are predictable; monitor and auto-restart the daemon (e.g., via systemd) as a stopgap, noting it does not stop sustained abort loops.
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View allVendor StatusVendor
SUSE
Severity: Important| Product | Status |
|---|---|
| SUSE Liberty Linux 10 | Fixed |
| SUSE Liberty Linux 8 | Fixed |
| SUSE Liberty Linux 9 | Fixed |
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External POC / Exploit Code
Leaving vuln.today
EUVD-2026-41440
GHSA-h4cv-5vw8-2p6m