CVE-2026-103600: Unbounded ASN.1 nesting depth causes process-terminating stack overflow

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-10-02 · updated 2026-10-28
Weakness: CWE-674

Description

Uncontrolled recursion in the ASN.1 parser (Asn1InputStream, Asn1StreamParser) in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp before 2.7.0 allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service via a crafted ASN.1 encoding of deeply nested constructed elements (for example SEQUENCE inside SEQUENCE, in definite-length DER or indefinite-length BER form), because each nesting level is parsed by a further recursive call with no bound on depth. About 2,000 levels (8 KB of DER) are enough to exhaust a 1.5 MB thread stack, the .NET main-thread default on Windows, and raise a StackOverflowException, which .NET cannot catch and which terminates the whole process; on threads with larger stacks, parse time instead grows quadratically with depth (about 9 seconds of CPU for a 64 KB input). Any path that parses untrusted ASN.1 is exposed, including X.509 certificates and CRLs, CMS/PKCS#7, PKCS#8/PKCS#12, OCSP and TLS Certificate messages.

Affected products

Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp: before 2.7.0 — fixed in 2.7.0
Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp: before 2.7.0 — fixed in 2.7.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp 2.7.0; Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp 2.7.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2026-103600 or the next vulnerability affects your stack