CVE-2025-14505 Elliptic Cryptanalysis vulnerability when `k` has leading zeros
Flawed ECDSA signature generation in the Elliptic library allows attackers to derive private keys and causes legitimate transaction failures.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2025-14505?
CVE-2025-14505 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elliptic, published on 8 Jan 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
The ECDSA implementation of the Elliptic package generates incorrect signatures if an interim value of 'k' (as computed based on step 3.2 of RFC 6979 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6979 ) has leading zeros and is susceptible to cryptanalysis, which can lead to secret key exposure. This happens, because the byte-length of 'k' is incorrectly computed, resulting in its getting truncated during the computation. Legitimate transactions or communications will be broken as a result. Furthermore, due to the nature of the fault, attackers could–under certain conditions–derive the secret key, if they could get their hands on both a faulty signature generated by a vulnerable version of Elliptic and a correct signature for the same inputs.
This issue affects all known versions of Elliptic (at the time of writing, versions less than or equal to 6.6.1).
Weakness: CWE-1240
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-14505?
2 open source packages ship an affected version, including elliptic.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
elliptic npm | All versions to 6.6.1 | None |
elliptic npm | All versions to 6.6.1 | None |
How do I fix CVE-2025-14505?
Upgrade to a fixed version.
Is CVE-2025-14505 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-14505 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as CLSA-2026-1772583206, CLSA-2026-1789597571, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-14505, GHSA-848j-6mx2-7j84, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-14505.