CVE-2026-103603 PUBLISHED

Unbounded HSS public key level count allows huge array allocation during signature verification

Assigner: bcorg
Reserved: 30.09.2026 Published: 02.10.2026 Updated: 02.10.2026

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.

Metrics

CVSS 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
CVSS Score: 8.7

Product Status

Vendor Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.
Product bc-csharp
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 2.7.0 (excl.)

Credits

  • Discovered by Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, and triaged by the Anthropic security team in collaboration with Anthropic Research. finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-789 Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value CWE

Impacts

  • Denial of Service (memory exhaustion during HSS signature verification)