High severity · published Jun 9, 2026
CVE-2026-45445
AES-OCB IV Ignored on EVP_Cipher() Path
7.5
CVSS
0.7%
EPSS
No
On KEV
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.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
None
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.7% · higher than 53% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
OP
OpenSSL · OpenSSL
4.0.0 before 4.0.1; 3.6.0 before 3.6.3; 3.5.0 before 3.5.7; 3.4.0 before 3.4.6; 3.0.0 before 3.0.21 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-45445
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-45445
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/323f0b6e7d530a4cb4336d50c88cb70f3ac2a451
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/787a6dfba81b7b09c1e05ab31396c0cd7c36b3f7
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/7ac4715234ee72d9f3c93426a2c08554b5b771af
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/843c9b94ca9c2ed248bb30127bb4f3d7af0d607c
Patch
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/983d54b5cce8d16147548ed1a37892d1720bbab6
Vendor Advisory
https://openssl-library.org/news/secadv/20260609.txt
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