CVE-2026-46033 PUBLISHED

crypto: authencesn - reject short ahash digests during instance creation

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 13.05.2026 Published: 27.05.2026 Updated: 27.05.2026

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

crypto: authencesn - reject short ahash digests during instance creation

authencesn requires either a zero authsize or an authsize of at least 4 bytes because the ESN encrypt/decrypt paths always move 4 bytes of high-order sequence number data at the end of the authenticated data.

While crypto_authenc_esn_setauthsize() already rejects explicit non-zero authsizes in the range 1..3, crypto_authenc_esn_create() still copied auth->digestsize into inst->alg.maxauthsize without validating it. The AEAD core then initialized the tfm's default authsize from that value.

As a result, selecting an ahash with digest size 1..3, such as cbcmac(cipher_null), exposed authencesn instances whose default authsize was invalid even though setauthsize() would have rejected the same value. AF_ALG could then trigger the ESN tail handling with a too-short tag and hit an out-of-bounds access.

Reject authencesn instances whose ahash digest size is in the invalid non-zero range 1..3 so that no tfm can inherit an unsupported default authsize.

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from f15f05b0a5de667c821a9727c33bce9d1d9b26dd to b69933e97efea238ebbfcf70c2b1be1cd03f13e3 (excl.)
  • affected from f15f05b0a5de667c821a9727c33bce9d1d9b26dd to 67f1f0933cc3d78dde222842bcad2778ec7a0b88 (excl.)
  • affected from f15f05b0a5de667c821a9727c33bce9d1d9b26dd to b42821c15445f93daea3e76ada682b2b7181c476 (excl.)
  • affected from f15f05b0a5de667c821a9727c33bce9d1d9b26dd to 9aff81e8217e9de2929084b03b3c7f81988c112b (excl.)
  • affected from f15f05b0a5de667c821a9727c33bce9d1d9b26dd to 5db6ef9847717329f12c5ea8aba7e9f588a980c0 (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 4.11 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 4.11 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.6.140 to 6.6.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.12.86 to 6.12.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.27 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.0.4 to 7.0.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.1-rc2 to * (incl.)

References