Vulnerability · Published Oct 2, 2026 · Assigned by bcorg
CVE-2026-103603Unbounded HSS public key level count allows huge array allocation during signature verification
High 8.7
In plain English
A high-severity security flaw in bc-csharp from Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.5% (higher than 45% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
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.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. | bc-csharp | 0 – before 2.7.0 |
Weakness: CWE-789 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N