CVE-2025-69418: Unauthenticated/unencrypted trailing bytes with low-level OCB function calls

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2025-69418 is a medium (CVSS 4.0) Missing Cryptographic Step vulnerability in openssl. EPSS estimates a 0.13% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 2.7% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 27-01-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 15-10-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Issue summary: When using the low-level OCB API directly with AES-NI or<br>other hardware-accelerated code paths, inputs whose length is not a multiple<br>of 16 bytes can leave the final partial block unencrypted and unauthenticated.<br><br>Impact summary: The trailing 1-15 bytes of a message may be exposed in<br>cleartext on encryption and are not covered by the authentication tag,<br>allowing an attacker to read or tamper with those bytes without detection.<br><br>The low-level OCB encrypt and decrypt routines in the hardware-accelerated<br>stream path process full 16-byte blocks but do not advance the input/output<br>pointers. The subsequent tail-handling code then operates on the original<br>base pointers, effectively reprocessing the beginning of the buffer while<br>leaving the actual trailing bytes unprocessed. The authentication checksum<br>also excludes the true tail bytes.<br><br>However, typical OpenSSL consumers using EVP are not affected because the<br>higher-level EVP and provider OCB implementations split inputs so that full<br>blocks and trailing partial blocks are processed in separate calls, avoiding<br>the problematic code path. Additionally, TLS does not use OCB ciphersuites.<br>The vulnerability only affects applications that call the low-level<br>CRYPTO_ocb128_encrypt() or CRYPTO_ocb128_decrypt() functions directly with<br>non-block-aligned lengths in a single call on hardware-accelerated builds.<br>For these reasons the issue was assessed as Low severity.<br><br>The FIPS modules in 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.2, 3.1 and 3.0 are not affected<br>by this issue, as OCB mode is not a FIPS-approved algorithm.<br><br>OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.0 and 1.1.1 are vulnerable to this issue.<br><br>OpenSSL 1.0.2 is not affected by this issue.

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