CVE-2021-40530

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.9 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2021-09-06 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-327

Description

The ElGamal implementation in Crypto++ through 8.5 allows plaintext recovery because, during interaction between two cryptographic libraries, a certain dangerous combination of the prime defined by the receiver's public key, the generator defined by the receiver's public key, and the sender's ephemeral exponents can lead to a cross-configuration attack against OpenPGP.

Affected products

Cryptopp Crypto++: through 8.5
Fedoraproject Fedora: 33, 34, 35

References

https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/923
https://ibm.github.io/system-security-research-updates/2021/07/20/insecurity-elgamal-pt1
https://ibm.github.io/system-security-research-updates/2021/09/06/insecurity-elgamal-pt2
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/57OJA2K5AHX5HAU2QBDRWLGIIUX7GASC/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/HGVBZ2TTRKCTYAZTRHTF6OBD4W37F5MT/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/VJYOZGWI7TD27SEXILSM6VUTPPEICDL7/
https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/923
https://ibm.github.io/system-security-research-updates/2021/07/20/insecurity-elgamal-pt1
https://ibm.github.io/system-security-research-updates/2021/09/06/insecurity-elgamal-pt2
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/57OJA2K5AHX5HAU2QBDRWLGIIUX7GASC/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/HGVBZ2TTRKCTYAZTRHTF6OBD4W37F5MT/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/VJYOZGWI7TD27SEXILSM6VUTPPEICDL7/

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