Description
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.
Affected products
bouncycastle: bc-java
References4
Metrics
- CVSS 3.1
-
5.9
MEDIUM
Score source: NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N - CVSS 4.0
-
8.2
HIGH
Score source: CNA
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:Amber - EPSS — exploit probability
- 0% percentile: 40 · as of 13 November 2026
- CWE
- CWE-208
Could this be exploited in your environment?
A patch closes the known hole. A penetration test shows what an attacker can still reach — with proof.