High · published April 7, 2026
Issue summary: Applications using RSASVE key encapsulation to establish
a secret encryption key can send contents of an uninitialized memory buffer to
a malicious peer.
Impact summary: The uninitialized buffer might contain sensitive data from the
previous execution of the application process which leads to sensitive data
leakage to an attacker.
RSA_public_encrypt() returns the number of bytes written on success and -1
on error. The affected code tests only whether the return value is non-zero.
As a result, if RSA encryption fails, encapsulation can still return success to
the caller, set the output lengths, and leave the caller to use the contents of
the ciphertext buffer as if a valid KEM ciphertext had been produced.
If applications use EVP_PKEY_encapsulate() with RSA/RSASVE on an
attacker-supplied invalid RSA public key without first validating that key,
then this may cause stale or uninitialized contents of the caller-provided
ciphertext buffer to be disclosed to the attacker in place of the KEM
ciphertext.
As a workaround calling EVP_PKEY_public_check() or
EVP_PKEY_public_check_quick() before EVP_PKEY_encapsulate() will mitigate
the issue.
The FIPS modules in 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.1 and 3.0 are affected by this issue.