Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC-JAVA up to 1.77 ML-KEM timing discrepancy

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as problematic was found in Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC-JAVA up to 1.77. This impacts the function Poly.toMsg/Poly.compressPoly/PolyVec.compressPolyVec of the component ML-KEM. Such manipulation leads to timing discrepancy. This vulnerability is referenced as CVE-2024-14041. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. No exploit is available.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC-JAVA up to 1.77 and classified as problematic. Affected by this issue is the function Poly.toMsg/Poly.compressPoly/PolyVec.compressPolyVec of the component ML-KEM. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a timing discrepancy vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-208. Two separate operations in a product require different amounts of time to complete, in a way that is observable to an actor and reveals security-relevant information about the state of the product, such as whether a particular operation was successful or not. Impacted is confidentiality. CVE summarizes:

In Bouncy Castle for Java from 1.73 to before 1.78, three ML-KEM (CRYSTALS-Kyber) routines divided secret-derived polynomial coefficients by the modulus q: Poly.toMsg, which decodes the decrypted message, and the ciphertext compression routines Poly.compressPoly and PolyVec.compressPolyVec. An attacker able to measure the timing of a large number of decapsulations performed with the same long-term private key can recover that key. These are the KyberSlash1 (Poly.toMsg) and KyberSlash2 (ciphertext compression) divisions. Compression performed during encapsulation operates on values that become the public ciphertext and is not affected.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2024-14041 since 07/28/2026. The exploitation is known to be difficult. The attack may be launched remotely. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. Successful exploitation requires user interaction by the victim. Technical details are known, but there is no available exploit. The structure of the vulnerability defines a possible price range of USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 07/28/2026). This vulnerability is assigned to T1592 by the MITRE ATT&CK project.

Upgrading to version 1.78 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Type

• Programming Language Software

Vendor

• Legion of the Bouncy Castle

Name

• BC-JAVA

Version

• 1.0
• 1.1
• 1.2
• 1.3
• 1.4
• 1.5
• 1.6
• 1.7
• 1.8
• 1.9
• 1.10
• 1.11
• 1.12
• 1.13
• 1.14
• 1.15
• 1.16
• 1.17
• 1.18
• 1.19
• 1.20
• 1.21
• 1.22
• 1.23
• 1.24
• 1.25
• 1.26
• 1.27
• 1.28
• 1.29
• 1.30
• 1.31
• 1.32
• 1.33
• 1.34
• 1.35
• 1.36
• 1.37
• 1.38
• 1.39
• 1.40
• 1.41
• 1.42
• 1.43
• 1.44
• 1.45
• 1.46
• 1.47
• 1.48
• 1.49
• 1.50
• 1.51
• 1.52
• 1.53
• 1.54
• 1.55
• 1.56
• 1.57
• 1.58
• 1.59
• 1.60
• 1.61
• 1.62
• 1.63
• 1.64
• 1.65
• 1.66
• 1.67
• 1.68
• 1.69
• 1.70
• 1.71
• 1.72
• 1.73
• 1.74
• 1.75
• 1.76
• 1.77

CPE 2.3info

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CPE 2.2info

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Entryinfo

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