Vulnerability in Rustcrypto Elliptic-Curves
CVE-2026-22698
RustCrypto: Elliptic Curves is general purpose Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) support, including types and traits for representing various elliptic curve forms, scalars, points, and public/secret keys composed thereof. In versions 0.14.0-pre.0 and 0.14.0-rc.0, a critical vulnerability exists in the SM2 Public Key Encryption (PKE) implementation where the ephemeral nonce k is generated with severely reduced entropy. A unit mismatch error causes the nonce generation function to request only 32 bits of randomness instead of the expected 256 bits. This reduces the security of the encryption from a 128-bit level to a trivial 16-bit level, allowing a practical attack to recover the nonce k and decrypt any ciphertext given only the public key and ciphertext. This issue has been patched via commit e4f7778.
EPSS: 0.002 (15.9th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 7.5 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N.
Affected products
- Rustcrypto Elliptic-curves — versions = 0.14.0-pre.0, = 0.14.0-rc.0
- Rustcrypto Sm2_elliptic_curve — versions 0.14.0
Weakness classification (CWE)
References
- security-advisories@github.com (x_refsource_CONFIRM, Exploit, Mitigation, Vendor Advisory)
- security-advisories@github.com (Patch, x_refsource_MISC, Issue Tracking)
- security-advisories@github.com (Patch, x_refsource_MISC)
- security-advisories@github.com (Patch, x_refsource_MISC)
- security-advisories@github.com (x_refsource_MISC, Release Notes)
- security-advisories@github.com (x_refsource_MISC, Release Notes)
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2026-22698?
- CVE-2026-22698 is a high-severity vulnerability in Rustcrypto Elliptic-Curves, classified under Insufficient Entropy. CVSS score: 7.5/10. Published 2026-01-10.
- How severe is CVE-2026-22698?
- High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.5 out of 10.