CVE-2025-49600: mbed mbedtls Missing Cryptographic Step

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2025-49600 is a medium (CVSS 4.9) Missing Cryptographic Step vulnerability in mbed mbedtls. EPSS estimates a 0.16% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 4.5% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 04-07-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 08-07-2025
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

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.

• CWE-325Missing Cryptographic StepThe product does not implement a required step in a cryptographic algorithm, resulting in weaker encryption than advertised by the algorithm.