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VulnerabilityPublished Updated

CVE-2026-8798: Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC-FJA · Infinite Loop

Affects Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC-FJASource CVE Database V5

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Not known to be exploited · CVSS 8.7 High : upgrade to 2.1.3 soon.

Data as of 5 Nov 2026, 23:24 UTC

CVSS 4.0 base score
8.7High
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.
EPSS
0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 37% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
Patch
Available – fixed in 2.1.3
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/U:Amber

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 8 Aug 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponized: no evidence on record.

    No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq 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 5 Nov 2026.

What to do

Upgrade Legion of the Bouncy Castle BC-FJA to 2.1.3.

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.BC-FJAAffected
  • >=2.1.0 <2.1.3
Fixed in
  • 2.1.3
Mavenorg.bouncycastle/bc-fipspkg:maven/org.bouncycastle/bc-fipsOther threatsAffected
  • =2.1.0
Fixed in–

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

AI-suggested

A fix is available in Bouncy Castle for Java FIPS version 2.1.3, which bounds the retry loops for RDSEED and RDRAND instructions and throws an exception on failure instead of looping indefinitely. Users should upgrade to version 2.1.3 or later to remediate this issue. No other mitigations are indicated.

Description

In Bouncy Castle for Java FIPS (BC-FJA) before bc-fips 2.1.3, the native entropy source used on Intel platforms retried the CPU entropy instructions without any bound. RDSEED and RDRAND report failure through their carry flag, and the JNI seeding routine spun re-issuing the instruction for as long as that flag stayed clear, so a persistent failure of the on-chip entropy source - whether from a hardware fault, from the underlying DRBG being exhausted by contention across many cores, or from a hypervisor that does not provide the instruction - left the calling thread looping indefinitely inside the JNI call, where it could be neither interrupted nor timed out. Any operation drawing from the native entropy source could therefore hang, denying service to the application. The retry loops are now bounded (200 attempts for RDSEED and 20 for RDRAND, twice the baselines given in Intel's Digital Random Number Generator software implementation guide), pausing between attempts and, on exhaustion, clearing any partially written buffer and throwing rather than continuing to spin. The clear is performed by an un-elidable memzero, which uses a volatile pointer and an assembly memory barrier so that a compiler cannot optimise the erase away as a dead store. Bouncy Castle for Java (bcprov) is not affected, as it has no native entropy source; the 1.0.X and 2.0.X FIPS series are not affected.

References

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