RUSTSEC-2026-0199 Panic in `bcrypt::verify` on non-ASCII hash input

bcrypt::verify(password, hash) and HashParts::from_str(hash) panic in str::slice_error_fail when given a 60-byte &str containing a multi-byte UTF-8 character at certain byte positions.

Impact

Any Rust code that calls bcrypt::verify (or HashParts::from_str) with an attacker-controlled hash string will panic. The bcrypt crate is #![forbid(unsafe_code)], so this is limited to a denial-of-service and cannot lead to memory corruption.

Realistic attack contexts include:

• Rust authentication services reading hashes from a database that was previously compromised via, e.g., SQL injection. The attacker can then crash the service on every login attempt against the tampered account.
• CLI tools accepting hashes from stdin or command-line arguments.
• Password managers or vault services loading hashes from untrusted configuration sources.

Root cause

split_hash performed five &str slicing operations on the input hash: &hash[1..3], &hash[4..6], &hash[7..], &salt_and_hash[..22], and &salt_and_hash[22..]. None of these were char-boundary-checked. Any input where a multi-byte UTF-8 character spanned one of those byte positions caused a panic.

This is a regression of the fix originally shipped in 2021 for issue #62 (commit 0833509). The regression was introduced in the parser rewrite in PR #95 (commit e9a8394, released as 0.19.0).

The pre-existing regression test does_no_error_on_char_boundary_splitting was not removed, but was silently rendered ineffective by the new bytes[0] != b'$' guard, which rejected its input earlier and prevented it from reaching the buggy slices — leaving CI green through the regression.

Fix

split_hash now rejects any hash string containing non-ASCII bytes up front. A valid bcrypt hash is always exactly 60 ASCII bytes, so this closes the entire class of byte-boundary panics rather than guarding each slice individually.

The fix was merged in PR #103 and released as bcrypt 0.19.2 on 2026-06-20.

Downstream impact

pyca/bcrypt (which depended on bcrypt 0.19.1) is not affected. Its Python-side wrapper performs its own byte-level salt parsing before invoking bcrypt::hash_with_salt, and never reaches the buggy code path in split_hash or verify.