strongswan strongMan up to 0.1.x nonce re-use

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as problematic was found in strongswan strongMan up to 0.1.x. Impacted is an unknown function. Such manipulation leads to nonce re-use. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-25998. The attack may be launched remotely. There is no exploit available. Upgrading the affected component is advised.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as problematic, has been found in strongswan strongMan up to 0.1.x. Affected by this issue is an unknown function. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a nonce re-use vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-323. Nonces should be used for the present occasion and only once. Impacted is confidentiality. CVE summarizes:

strongMan is a management interface for strongSwan, an OpenSource IPsec-based VPN. When storing credentials in the database (private keys, EAP secrets), strongMan encrypts the corresponding database fields. So far it used AES in CTR mode with a global database key. Together with an initialization vector (IV), a key stream is generated to encrypt the data in the database fields. But because strongMan did not generate individual IVs, every database field was encrypted using the same key stream. An attacker that has access to the database can use this to recover the encrypted credentials. In particular, because certificates, which have to be considered public information, are also encrypted using the same mechanism, an attacker can directly recover a large chunk of the key stream, which allows them to decrypt basically all other secrets especially ECDSA private keys and EAP secrets, which are usually a lot shorter. Version 0.2.0 fixes the issue by switching to AES-GCM-SIV encryption with a random nonce and an individually derived encryption key, using HKDF, for each encrypted value. Database migrations are provided to automatically re-encrypt all credentials.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2026-25998 since 02/09/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be launched remotely. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not available. This vulnerability is assigned to T1600.001 by the MITRE ATT&CK project.

Upgrading to version 0.2.0 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Type

• Network Encryption Software

Vendor

• strongswan

Name

• strongMan

Version

• 0.1

License

• open-source

Website

• Product: https://github.com/strongswan/strongMan/

CPE 2.3info

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CPE 2.2info

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