CVE-2025-53627 Meshtastic firmware allows forged DMs with no PKC to show up as encrypted
Attackers can inject spoofed direct messages that appear encrypted by exploiting a silent fallback to legacy encryption, bypassing PKI security guarantees.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2025-53627?
CVE-2025-53627 is a medium-severity vulnerability in meshtastic firmware, published on 29 Dec 2025. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Meshtastic is an open source mesh networking solution. The Meshtastic firmware (starting from version 2.5) introduces asymmetric encryption (PKI) for direct messages, but when the `pki_encrypted` flag is missing, the firmware silently falls back to legacy AES-256-CTR channel encryption. This was an intentional decision to maintain backwards compatibility. However, the end-user applications, like Web app, iOS/Android app, and applications built on top of Meshtastic using the SDK, did not have a way to differentiate between end-to-end encrypted DMs and the legacy DMs. This creates a downgrade attack path where adversaries who know a shared channel key can craft and inject spoofed direct messages that are displayed as if they were PKC encrypted. Users are not given any feedback of whether a direct message was decrypted with PKI or with legacy symmetric encryption, undermining the expected security guarantees of the PKI rollout. Version 2.7.15 fixes this issue.
Weakness: CWE-1287
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-53627?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Meshtastic Meshtastic Firmware.
How do I fix CVE-2025-53627?
No fix has been published for CVE-2025-53627 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2025-53627 being exploited?
It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2025-53627 exists.
Other vulnerabilities in meshtastic firmware
- CVE-2025-52464 Meshtastic Repeated Public and Private Keypairs
- CVE-2025-55293 Meshtastic allows crafting of specific NodeInfo packets that overwrite any publicKey saved in the NodeDB
- CVE-2025-24797 Meshtastic incorrectly hands malformed packets leads to controlled buffer overflow
- CVE-2025-55292 In Meshtastic, an attacker can spoof licensed amateur flag for a node
- CVE-2024-47078 Meshtastic firmware Authentication/Authorization Bypass via MQTT
Sources
Also known as GHSA-377p-prwp-4hwf.