CVE-2026-75806: Unauthenticated and Undersized DTLS 1.2 AEAD Record Causes DoS

Issue summary: An established DTLS 1.2 association using an AEAD cipher suite can be terminated by a single unauthenticated datagram whose encrypted fragment is shorter than the mandatory explicit IV and authentication tag overhead.

Impact summary: An attacker who can send a datagram that is routed to an existing DTLS 1.2 association can tear that association down without knowing any key material. This is a Denial of Service limited to the targeted association. There is no memory safety or confidentiality impact.

CWE: CWE-1284: Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input

Description: In TLS 1.2 and DTLS 1.2 every record protected by an AEAD cipher suite carries an explicit IV followed by the ciphertext and an authentication tag. When decrypting such a record the record layer passed the record length to the cipher implementation before checking that the record was long enough to contain the explicit IV and the tag. For a record shorter than that overhead the cipher implementation rejected the impossible length, and the record layer treated this as an internal failure and raised a fatal internalerror alert instead of treating the record as one that failed authentication.

In TLS 1.2 the same record causes a fatal internalerror alert instead of the expected badrecordmac alert. Since any undecryptable record already terminates a TLS connection, this is a protocol conformance issue rather than a security issue in TLS.

The fix validates the record length against the explicit IV and tag length before any AEAD processing, so that TLS reports badrecordmac and DTLS silently discards the record.

FIPS impact: no The affected code is outside the FIPS module boundary.