Legion of the Bouncy Castle Bouncy Castle Java up to 1.85 HQC timing discrepancy

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Bouncy Castle Java up to 1.85. It has been rated as problematic. The impacted element is an unknown function of the component HQC. Performing a manipulation results in timing discrepancy. This vulnerability was named CVE-2026-18040. The attack may be initiated remotely. There is no available exploit. Upgrading the affected component is advised.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability classified as problematic has been found in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Bouncy Castle Java up to 1.85. This affects an unknown function of the component HQC. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a timing discrepancy vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as 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. This is going to have an impact on confidentiality. The summary by CVE is:

In Bouncy Castle for Java before 1.86, HQC leaked secret-derived data through two side channels: its GF(2^8) arithmetic used lookup tables indexed by field elements, making the cache line touched a function of the operand, and its fixed-weight support sampler left its duplicate scan as soon as a collision was found and stored accepted positions at a secret index. Both run on secret inputs during encapsulation and decapsulation, and the sampler re-expands the secret key from its seed on every decapsulation, so an attacker able to observe cache behaviour or decapsulation timing can recover information about the HQC private key. The field arithmetic is now table-free and the sampler branch-free within a batch of candidates, with output and randomness consumption unchanged.

It is possible to read the advisory at github.com. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2026-18040 since 07/28/2026. The exploitability is told to be difficult. It is possible to initiate the attack remotely. No form of authentication is needed for exploitation. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not publicly available. The attack technique deployed by this issue is T1592 according to MITRE ATT&CK.

Upgrading to version 1.86 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Type

• Programming Language Software

Vendor

• Legion of the Bouncy Castle

Name

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

CPE 2.3info

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CPE 2.2info

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