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.

Published · last modified .

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.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.003 (17.0th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 17th percentile — 17.0% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-22698: held from 0.003 to 0.003.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.003 · newest: 0.003 · change: +0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

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.