CVE-2025-49600: Medium severity Arm MbedTLS vulnerability
In MbedTLS 3.3.0 before 3.6.4, mbedtlslmsverify 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 mbedtlslmsverify 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 mbedtlslmsverify, the return values of the internal Merkle tree functions createmerkleleafvalue and createmerkleinternalvalue are not checked. These functions return an integer that indicates whether the call succeeded or not. If a failure occurs, the output buffer (Tccandidaterootnode) 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.
Affected Software
Event History
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the severity of CVE-2025-49600?
CVE-2025-49600 is considered a critical vulnerability due to its potential for enabling signature forgery.
How do I fix CVE-2025-49600?
To remediate CVE-2025-49600, update MbedTLS to version 3.6.4 or newer.
Who is affected by CVE-2025-49600?
CVE-2025-49600 affects users of MbedTLS versions from 3.3.0 to 3.6.4.
What kind of attack can be executed due to CVE-2025-49600?
An attacker can exploit CVE-2025-49600 to forge LMS signatures in fault conditions.
What component of MbedTLS is impacted by CVE-2025-49600?
CVE-2025-49600 specifically impacts the mbedtls_lms_verify function within MbedTLS.