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.
Any server or client that accepts RSA-based IKEv2 connections via the default authby= settings is vulnerable to denial of service. Authentication bypass additionally requires the use of RSA keys with weak exponents (e=3). IKEv2 by default allows ECDSA, RSA-SSA-PSS, and RSA PKCS#1 1.5 as fallback due to Microsoft Windows not supporting RSASSA-PSS.
No known exploitation in the wild. The authentication bypass requires the target to use RSA keys with weak exponents (e=3), which have been disallowed by most cryptographic libraries for at least a decade. The denial-of-service attack is exploitable against any IKEv2 configuration using default authby= settings that permit RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 fallback.
If Windows support is not needed, configure authby=ecdsa or authby=rsa-sha2 (or both via authby=ecdsa,rsa-sha2) to disallow the fallback of RSA PKCS#1 1.5. The leftauth= and rightauth= settings can be updated similarly if those are in use instead of authby.
Upgrade to libreswan 5.3.1 or later. Patches for libreswan 4.15 and 5.3 are available at https://libreswan.org/security/CVE-2026-50722/