CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-44378 — Botan is a C++ cryptography library

High CVSS 7.5

Botan is a C++ cryptography library. Prior to 3.12.0, certain patterns of indefinite length encodings in BER data could cause quadratic behavior in the parser, resulting in a denial of service. Such BER encodings were accepted even in structures which are required to be encoded as DER, which prohibits indefinite length encodings. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.12.0.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-05-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-407

Affected products

  • botan_project / botan

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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