Perl Crypt::Age Allows Denial of Service via Unbounded Recipient Stanzas

CVE-2026-85783

What is CVE-2026-85783?

The Crypt::Age Perl module versions prior to 0.004 are vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack due to CPU exhaustion. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending an unbounded number of recipient stanzas during file decryption. Each stanza incurs computational costs as the unwrap_file_key function processes every identity against each X25519 stanza through scalar multiplications. This can lead to significant performance degradation, as the system continues to attempt to unwrap file keys using maliciously constructed headers before rejecting the file. The vulnerability arises in the header parser, which does not initially validate the header MAC, ultimately allowing attackers to consume substantial CPU resources.

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