CVE-2026-103600 Unbounded ASN.1 nesting depth causes process-terminating stack overflow
Remote attackers can crash applications using the Bouncy Castle C# library by sending deeply nested ASN.1 data, causing a stack overflow.
- 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-2026-103600?
CVE-2026-103600 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp, published on 2 Oct 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Uncontrolled recursion in the ASN.1 parser (Asn1InputStream, Asn1StreamParser) in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp before 2.7.0 allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service via a crafted ASN.1 encoding of deeply nested constructed elements (for example SEQUENCE inside SEQUENCE, in definite-length DER or indefinite-length BER form), because each nesting level is parsed by a further recursive call with no bound on depth. About 2,000 levels (8 KB of DER) are enough to exhaust a 1.5 MB thread stack, the .NET main-thread default on Windows, and raise a StackOverflowException, which .NET cannot catch and which terminates the whole process; on threads with larger stacks, parse time instead grows quadratically with depth (about 9 seconds of CPU for a 64 KB input). Any path that parses untrusted ASN.1 is exposed, including X.509 certificates and CRLs, CMS/PKCS#7, PKCS#8/PKCS#12, OCSP and TLS Certificate messages.
Weakness: CWE-674
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-103600?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Bouncycastle Bc-Csharp.
How do I fix CVE-2026-103600?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-103600 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2026-103600 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-103600 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp
- CVE-2026-63569 MTI/A0 DHAgreement does not validate the peer's ephemeral value
- CVE-2026-103603 Unbounded HSS public key level count allows huge array allocation during signature verification
- CVE-2026-103604 Quadratic-time escaping when converting X.509 distinguished names to strings
- CVE-2026-16000 KCcmBlockCipher (DSTU 7624 CCM) tag not bound to nonce when no associated data is used
- CVE-2026-63566 DTLS handshake reassembler allocates buffer from unchecked 24-bit length
Sources
Also known as GHSA-xp76-rp77-x5w9.