CVE-2026-31790 PUBLISHED

Incorrect Failure Handling in RSA KEM RSASVE Encapsulation

Assigner: openssl
Reserved: 09.03.2026 Published: 07.04.2026 Updated: 08.04.2026

Issue summary: Applications using RSASVE key encapsulation to establish a secret encryption key can send contents of an uninitialized memory buffer to a malicious peer.

Impact summary: The uninitialized buffer might contain sensitive data from the previous execution of the application process which leads to sensitive data leakage to an attacker.

RSA_public_encrypt() returns the number of bytes written on success and -1 on error. The affected code tests only whether the return value is non-zero. As a result, if RSA encryption fails, encapsulation can still return success to the caller, set the output lengths, and leave the caller to use the contents of the ciphertext buffer as if a valid KEM ciphertext had been produced.

If applications use EVP_PKEY_encapsulate() with RSA/RSASVE on an attacker-supplied invalid RSA public key without first validating that key, then this may cause stale or uninitialized contents of the caller-provided ciphertext buffer to be disclosed to the attacker in place of the KEM ciphertext.

As a workaround calling EVP_PKEY_public_check() or EVP_PKEY_public_check_quick() before EVP_PKEY_encapsulate() will mitigate the issue.

The FIPS modules in 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.1 and 3.0 are affected by this issue.

Product Status

Vendor OpenSSL
Product OpenSSL
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 3.6.0 to 3.6.2 (excl.)
  • affected from 3.5.0 to 3.5.6 (excl.)
  • affected from 3.4.0 to 3.4.5 (excl.)
  • affected from 3.3.0 to 3.3.7 (excl.)
  • affected from 3.0.0 to 3.0.20 (excl.)

Credits

  • Simo Sorce (Red Hat) reporter
  • Nikola Pajkovsky remediation developer

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-754 Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions CWE