CVE-2026-13505 Zeroisation of sensitive key material on garbage collection relies on finalization
Attackers can cause memory exhaustion and retain sensitive keys in memory by exploiting deprecated finalization mechanisms in the Bouncy Castle FIPS Java library.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-13505?
CVE-2026-13505 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. BC-FJA, published on 8 Aug 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In Bouncy Castle for Java FIPS (BC-FJA) before bc-fips 1.0.2.7 (1.0.X series), 2.0.2 (2.0.X series) and 2.1.3 (2.1.X series), sensitive key material held by the AES and DESede engines, the SP 800-90A DRBGs, SymmetricSecretKey and the PBKD and scrypt parameter classes was zeroised on garbage collection by overriding Object.finalize. Finalization runs at an unspecified time and in an unspecified order and is serviced by a single finalizer thread, so where objects carrying a finalizer are allocated faster than that thread retires them the pending-finalization queue grows without bound: disposal falls arbitrarily far behind, which can contribute to an OutOfMemoryError under load, and the key material those objects hold stays resident in the heap for as long as they are queued, defeating the purpose of the zeroisation. The behaviour was not a problem on Java 8 or Java 11; it is later JVMs, on which finalization has been deprecated and progressively de-emphasised, where it becomes one. Disposal of these classes now runs from a java.lang.ref.Cleaner registered in the multi-release jdk1.9 overlay, so on Java 9 and later it no longer depends on the finalizer being scheduled. Bouncy Castle for Java (bcprov) and Bouncy Castle for Java LTS are not affected, as neither implements the finalizer-based zeroisation scheme.
Weakness: CWE-772
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-13505?
6 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.bouncycastle:bc-fips.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
org.bouncycastle:bc-fips Maven | All versions | 1.0.2.7 |
org.bouncycastle:bc-fips Maven | All versions | 1.0.2.7 |
org.bouncycastle:bc-fips Maven | From 2.0.0 | 2.0.2 |
org.bouncycastle:bc-fips Maven | From 2.0.0 | 2.0.2 |
org.bouncycastle:bc-fips Maven | From 2.1.0 | 2.1.3 |
org.bouncycastle:bc-fips Maven | From 2.1.0 | 2.1.3 |
How do I fix CVE-2026-13505?
Upgrade org.bouncycastle:bc-fips to a fixed version for your release line: 1.0.2.7, 2.0.2 or 2.1.3.
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-2026-13505 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-13505 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as CLEANSTART-2026-KE90192, ECHO-d092-28e1-ed95, GHSA-98j2-6v39-78w8, MINI-2v35-4r5j-mhjh, MINI-3q8g-m33m-j66h, MINI-435g-9xr7-xv6x and 14 more.