CVE-2024-14041: Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC-JAVA · Timing Side Channel
Affects Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC-JAVASource CVE Database V5
Not known to be exploited · CVSS 8.2 High : upgrade to 1.78 soon.
Data as of 26 Oct 2026, 17:16 UTC
- EPSS
- 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 39% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
- Patch
- Available – fixed in 1.78
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/U:AmberExploitation evidence
Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 28 Jul 2026
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponised: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors
A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 26 Oct 2026.
What to do
Upgrade BC-JAVA and bcprov to 1.78.
Affected software
| Product | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.BC-JAVA | Affected
| Fixed in
|
GitHubbcprovpkg:github/bcprovOther threats | Affected
| Fixed in
|
Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.
AI-suggested
If you cannot patch yet, users should consider limiting exposure of the affected decapsulation operations to untrusted parties or applying additional mitigations to reduce timing side-channel leakage if possible.
Description
In Bouncy Castle for Java from 1.73 to before 1.78, three ML-KEM (CRYSTALS-Kyber) routines divided secret-derived polynomial coefficients by the modulus q: Poly.toMsg, which decodes the decrypted message, and the ciphertext compression routines Poly.compressPoly and PolyVec.compressPolyVec. An attacker able to measure the timing of a large number of decapsulations performed with the same long-term private key can recover that key. These are the KyberSlash1 (Poly.toMsg) and KyberSlash2 (ciphertext compression) divisions. Compression performed during encapsulation operates on values that become the public ciphertext and is not affected.