All vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-103600

bc-csharp: Unbounded ASN.1 nesting depth causes process-terminating stack overflow

Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp
CVSS
8.7High
ExploitationNo known exploitationNot in CISA KEV, which does not prove it is unexploitedCISA KEV
Exploit odds (EPSS)0.32%Chance of exploitation activity in the next 30 days, higher than 23% of CVEs. Scored 23 Oct 2026FIRST EPSS
Fixed in2.7.0Fixed versionCVE List
Published2 Oct 2026Updated 2 Oct 2026CVE List

What fixes it

A fixed version on one release line is not the upgrade target for every line. Check your exact version and any vendor backports.

Description

Uncontrolled recursion in the ASN.1 parser (Asn1InputStream, Asn1StreamParser) in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp before 2.7.0 allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service via a crafted ASN.1 encoding of deeply nested constructed elements (for example SEQUENCE inside SEQUENCE, in definite-length DER or indefinite-length BER form), because each nesting level is parsed by a further recursive call with no bound on depth. About 2,000 levels (8 KB of DER) are enough to exhaust a 1.5 MB thread stack, the .NET main-thread default on Windows, and raise a StackOverflowException, which .NET cannot catch and which terminates the whole process; on threads with larger stacks, parse time instead grows quadratically with depth (about 9 seconds of CPU for a 64 KB input). Any path that parses untrusted ASN.1 is exposed, including X.509 certificates and CRLs, CMS/PKCS#7, PKCS#8/PKCS#12, OCSP and TLS Certificate messages.

Text from CVE List

Affected versions 1

  • bc-csharpaffected: all versions before 2.7.0CVE List

References 3