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MEDIUM

In MbedTLS 3.3.0 before 3.6.4, mbedtls_lms_verify may accept invalid signatures if hash computation fails and internal errors go unchecked, enabling LMS (Leighton-Micali Signature) forgery in a fault scenario

Published Jul 4, 2025

Description

In MbedTLS 3.3.0 before 3.6.4, mbedtls_lms_verify may accept invalid signatures if hash computation fails and internal errors go unchecked, enabling LMS (Leighton-Micali Signature) forgery in a fault scenario. Specifically, unchecked return values in mbedtls_lms_verify allow an attacker (who can induce a hardware hash accelerator fault) to bypass LMS signature verification by reusing stale stack data, resulting in acceptance of an invalid signature. In mbedtls_lms_verify, the return values of the internal Merkle tree functions create_merkle_leaf_value and create_merkle_internal_value are not checked. These functions return an integer that indicates whether the call succeeded or not. If a failure occurs, the output buffer (Tc_candidate_root_node) may remain uninitialized, and the result of the signature verification is unpredictable. When the software implementation of SHA-256 is used, these functions will not fail. However, with hardware-accelerated hashing, an attacker could use fault injection against the accelerator to bypass verification.

Affected products

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Metrics

Weaknesses (1)

References (1)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner mitre
Published Jul 4, 2025
Updated Jul 8, 2025
Reserved Jun 6, 2025
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Jul 8, 2025
NVD
Status Analyzed
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity n/a
Public date n/a