All vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-103604

bc-csharp: Quadratic-time escaping when converting X.509 distinguished names to strings

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)0.26%Chance of exploitation activity in the next 30 days, higher than 16% 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

Inefficient algorithmic complexity in X.509 distinguished name string conversion (X509Name.ToString and IetfUtilities.ValueToString) in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp before 2.7.0 allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service through CPU exhaustion via a certificate, CRL, certification request or other structure whose name contains a long attribute value made up of characters that must be escaped, such as commas, or of leading or trailing spaces, because each escaping backslash was inserted into the buffer being scanned, so the work grew quadratically with the length of the value. Applications are exposed when they convert such a name to a string, for example to log or display it, or compare it with IetfUtilities.RdnAreEqual, as PKIX path validation does for directoryName name constraints.

Text from CVE List

Affected versions 1

  • bc-csharpaffected: all versions before 2.7.0CVE List

References 2