CVE-2026-57082 PUBLISHED

Net::BitTorrent versions through 2.0.1 for Perl generate the MSE Diffie-Hellman private key with a non-cryptographic PRNG

Assigner: CPANSec
Reserved: 23.06.2026 Published: 30.06.2026 Updated: 30.06.2026

Net::BitTorrent versions through 2.0.1 for Perl generate the MSE Diffie-Hellman private key with a non-cryptographic PRNG.

The MSE (Message Stream Encryption) handshake derives its 160-bit Diffie-Hellman private key from Perl's rand(), a non-cryptographic drand48-class generator seeded once per process, in KeyExchange.pm. The shared secret and the RC4 keys derived from it (the SHA-1 of "keyA" or "keyB", the shared secret, and the infohash) therefore depend entirely on a predictable PRNG. The same handshake sends, in cleartext, random padding drawn from the same rand() sequence in _random_pad, immediately after the public key and the private-key draw.

A passive observer of the handshake recovers the PRNG state from the cleartext padding, reconstructs the private key, computes the shared secret from the peer's public key on the wire, derives the RC4 keys, and decrypts the connection, defeating the passive-observation obfuscation MSE provides.

Product Status

Vendor SANKO
Product Net::BitTorrent
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 2.0.1 (incl.)

Workarounds

There is no fixed release. Draw the Diffie-Hellman private key and the handshake padding from a cryptographic source such as Crypt::URandom rather than rand().

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-338 Use of Cryptographically Weak Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) CWE
  • CWE-330 Use of Insufficiently Random Values CWE