Legion of the Bouncy Castle up to 1.85 High-Level OpenPGP Certificate API privileges management

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Bouncy Castle up to 1.85 and classified as critical. This issue affects the function OpenPGPCertificate.getCertificationBy/OpenPGPCertificate.getDelegationBy of the component High-Level OpenPGP Certificate API. The manipulation results in privileges management. This vulnerability is known as CVE-2026-71886. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. No exploit is available. It is suggested to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Bouncy Castle up to 1.85. It has been classified as critical. Affected is the function OpenPGPCertificate.getCertificationBy/OpenPGPCertificate.getDelegationBy of the component High-Level OpenPGP Certificate API. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a privileges management vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-269. The product does not properly assign, modify, track, or check privileges for an actor, creating an unintended sphere of control for that actor. This is going to have an impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

In Bouncy Castle for Java before 1.86, the high-level OpenPGP certificate API accepted a third-party certification or trust delegation from any component key of the issuing certificate, without requiring that component to have been granted the authority to certify. OpenPGPCertificate.getCertificationBy() and getDelegationBy() resolve a third-party signature by matching its issuer key identifier against every key of the third-party certificate, then verify the issuing component's binding chain and the signature itself; nothing checked that the issuing component carried the RFC 9580 sec. 5.2.3.29 certification key flag (CERTIFY_OTHER) when the signature was created. A subkey bound only with SIGN_DATA - the online signing subkey of exactly the offline-primary arrangement those key flags exist to express - could therefore issue a positive User ID certification over an attacker-controlled identity, or a full-trust depth-one direct-key delegation of introducer trust, and the API returned it as a valid signature chain attributed to the third-party certificate. An application treating getCertificationBy(...).isValid() or getDelegationBy(...) as an identity or trusted-introducer decision would attribute the attacker's assertion to the offline primary key. The same held for a legacy RSA subkey bound only for encryption, whose algorithm is nonetheless able to sign. This does not forge the primary key's signature or recover any private key; it promotes an already-compromised restricted subkey to the primary key's identity-issuing authority, defeating the containment the key-flag separation provides. A third-party certification or delegation is now attributed to the issuing certificate only when the component key that made it is the primary key, or is a subkey holding CERTIFY_OTHER when the signature was created, so certification-capable subkeys continue to be accepted; primary keys are accepted whatever their key flags say, since a primary key is certification-capable by construction and certificates carrying no key flags subpacket at all are common. Third-party revocations are deliberately outside the rule, since declining to honour one would keep trust alive rather than withdraw it.

The advisory is shared for download at github.com. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-71886 since 08/08/2026. The exploitability is told to be easy. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. The exploitation doesn't require any form of authentication. There are known technical details, but no exploit is available. The MITRE ATT&CK project declares the attack technique as T1068.

Upgrading to version 1.86 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Vendor

• Legion of the Bouncy Castle

Name

• Bouncy Castle

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
• 1.78
• 1.79
• 1.80
• 1.81
• 1.82
• 1.83
• 1.84
• 1.85

CPE 2.3info

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Entryinfo

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