Buffer Overflow Vulnerability in Botan Cryptography Library by Randombit

CVE-2026-104267

What is CVE-2026-104267?

A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the Botan C++ cryptography library due to unchecked multiplication in the Scrypt implementation. On 32-bit platforms, this flaw can be exploited by providing attacker-controlled Scrypt parameters, leading to an allocation size that wraps, resulting in a heap buffer overflow. Attackers could craft a triggering parameter set, causing a denial of service via crashing the process as approximately four gigabytes of output are mistakenly written past the allocated buffer. While arbitrary code execution remains unproven and seems complex to achieve, the overwrite primitive cannot be completely dismissed. This vulnerability impacts various applications that use Scrypt and accept external parameters, especially those aimed at decrypting attacker-supplied encrypted private keys. It has been addressed in version 3.13.0.

References