CVE-2026-42768

Issue summary: The CMS_decrypt and PKCS7_decrypt functions are vulnerable to Bleichenbacher-style attack when an attacker is able to provide the CMS or S/MIME messages and observe the error code and/or decryption output.

Impact summary: The Bleichenbacher-style attack allows an attacker to use the victim's vulnerable application as a way to decrypt or sign messages with the victim's private RSA key.

The attack is possible in 2 variants.

1. The decryption API (CMS_decrypt(), PKCS7_decrypt()) is used without providing the recipient certificate. In this case OpenSSL iterates over every KeyTransRecipientInfo (KTRI) without stopping at the first success.

An attacker who authors a message with two KTRI entries — the first one wrapping a real CEK under the victim's public key, the second with an arbitrary probe ciphertext — obtains opportunity to iterate the 2nd KTRI to get a valid PKCS#1 v1.5 padding if the error code of the application is available.

That is a Bleichenbacher oracle (Bleichenbacher, CRYPTO '98): an adaptive-chosen-ciphertext side channel from which the attacker decrypts any RSA ciphertext to the victim's key or forges any PKCS#1 v1.5 signature under it.

2. When the decryption API (CMS_decrypt(), PKCS7_decrypt()) is provided with the recipient certificate, and the recipient is not found, a random key is substituted.

An attacker who authors a message and is able to compare both error code and the result of the decryption, can mount a Bleichenbacher oracle.

We are not aware of any applications that provide a remote attacker an opportunity to mount an attack described in these scenarios. We consider the existence of such application very unlikely, and for this reason this CVE has been evaluated as Low severity.

To avoid these attacks, when RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 Key Transport is in use, the invoked EVP_PKEY_decrypt() will use the implicit rejection mechanism described in draft-irtf-cfrg-rsa-guidance. In previous OpenSSL releases the implicit rejection was...