CVE-2026-25998 strongMan vulnerable to private credential recovery due to key and counter reuse
An attacker with database access can recover private keys and secrets due to IV reuse in strongMan's encryption implementation.
- 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-2026-25998?
CVE-2026-25998 is a high-severity vulnerability in strongswan strongMan, published on 19 Feb 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
strongMan is a management interface for strongSwan, an OpenSource IPsec-based VPN. When storing credentials in the database (private keys, EAP secrets), strongMan encrypts the corresponding database fields. So far it used AES in CTR mode with a global database key. Together with an initialization vector (IV), a key stream is generated to encrypt the data in the database fields. But because strongMan did not generate individual IVs, every database field was encrypted using the same key stream. An attacker that has access to the database can use this to recover the encrypted credentials. In particular, because certificates, which have to be considered public information, are also encrypted using the same mechanism, an attacker can directly recover a large chunk of the key stream, which allows them to decrypt basically all other secrets especially ECDSA private keys and EAP secrets, which are usually a lot shorter. Version 0.2.0 fixes the issue by switching to AES-GCM-SIV encryption with a random nonce and an individually derived encryption key, using HKDF, for each encrypted value. Database migrations are provided to automatically re-encrypt all credentials.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-25998?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Strongswan Strongman.
How do I fix CVE-2026-25998?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-25998 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2026-25998 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-25998 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-88w4-jv97-c8xr.