crypto: authencesn - reject short ahash digests during instance creation
At a glance
Severity
HIGH 7.1
EPSS
EPSS 0.14 % · percentile 3 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
Linux
NVD status
Modified
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
crypto: authencesn - reject short ahash digests during instance creation
authencesn requires either a zero authsize or an authsize of at least
4 bytes because the ESN encrypt/decrypt paths always move 4 bytes of
high-order sequence number data at the end of the authenticated data.
While crypto_authenc_esn_setauthsize() already rejects explicit
non-zero authsizes in the range 1..3, crypto_authenc_esn_create()
still copied auth->digestsize into inst->alg.maxauthsize without
validating it. The AEAD core then initialized the tfm's default
authsize from that value.
As a result, selecting an ahash with digest size 1..3, such as
cbcmac(cipher_null), exposed authencesn instances whose default
authsize was invalid even though setauthsize() would have rejected the
same value. AF_ALG could then trigger the ESN tail handling with a
too-short tag and hit an out-of-bounds access.
Reject authencesn instances whose ahash digest size is in the invalid
non-zero range 1..3 so that no tfm can inherit an unsupported default
authsize.
