Out-of-Bounds Read Vulnerability in liboqs Cryptographic Library

CVE-2026-44518

What is CVE-2026-44518?

The liboqs cryptographic library suffers from an out-of-bounds read vulnerability within its XMSS and XMSS^MT stateful signature verification code. This issue occurs when the verification function is invoked with a signature buffer that is shorter than expected, causing the implementation to read beyond the end of the buffer due to a lack of validation on the provided length. While the out-of-bounds bytes are only utilized for an internal hash computation and are not exposed to the caller, this can lead to a potential denial of service if the read operation accesses an unmapped memory page. Users are advised to upgrade to version 0.16.0 or later to mitigate this risk.

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