CVE-2026-45445

AES-OCB IV Ignored on EVP_Cipher() Path

HIGH
7.5
CVSS Score
Published: June 9, 2026 at 04:03 PM UTC
Updated: July 23, 2026 at 07:32 PM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorOpenSSL

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Severity
HIGH7.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.7%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

Issue summary: When an application drives an AES-OCB context through the public EVP_Cipher() one-shot interface, the application-supplied initialisation vector (IV) is silently discarded. Impact summary: Every message encrypted under the same key uses the same effective nonce regardless of the IV supplied by the caller, resulting in (key, nonce) reuse and loss of confidentiality. If the same code path is used to compute the authentication tag, the tag depends only on the (key, IV) pair and not on the plaintext or ciphertext, allowing universal forgery of arbitrary ciphertext from a single captured message. OpenSSL provides two ways to drive a cipher: the documented streaming interface (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) and a lower-level one-shot, EVP_Cipher(), whose documentation explicitly recommends against use by applications in favour of EVP_CipherUpdate() and EVP_CipherFinal_ex(). The OCB provider's streaming handler flushes the application-supplied IV into the OCB context before processing data; the one-shot handler did not. Every call to EVP_Cipher() on an AES-OCB context therefore ran with the all-zero key-derived offset state left by cipher initialisation, regardless of the caller's IV. If EVP_EncryptFinal_ex() is subsequently used to obtain the authentication tag, the deferred IV setup runs at that point and clears the running checksum that should have been accumulated over the plaintext. The resulting tag is a function of (key, IV) only and verifies against any ciphertext produced under the same (key, IV) pair. The OpenSSL SSL/TLS implementation is not affected: AES-OCB is not a TLS cipher suite, and libssl does not call EVP_Cipher() in any case. Applications that drive AES-OCB through the documented streaming AEAD API (EVP_CipherUpdate / EVP_CipherFinal_ex) are not affected. Only applications that combine the AES-OCB cipher with the EVP_Cipher() one-shot API are vulnerable. The FIPS modules in 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as AES-OCB is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

3.0.0 ≤ v < 3.0.213.4.0 ≤ v < 3.4.63.5.0 ≤ v < 3.5.73.6.0 ≤ v < 3.6.34.0.0 ≤ v < 4.0.13.0.03.4.03.5.03.6.04.0.0
Affected range stops below 3.0.21, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 3.4.6, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 3.5.7, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 3.6.3, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 4.0.1, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitAutomatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

7.5HIGHCISA-ADP
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
HIGH
Integrity
NONE
Availability
NONE
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusANALYZED
CWE
CWE-325

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