CVE-2026-25998 (GCVE-0-2026-25998)

Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2026-02-19 15:51 – Updated: 2026-02-20 15:42
VLAI
Title
strongMan vulnerable to private credential recovery due to key and counter reuse
Summary
strongMan is a management interface for strongSwan, an OpenSource IPsec-based VPN. When storing credentials in the database (private keys, EAP secrets), strongMan encrypts the corresponding database fields. So far it used AES in CTR mode with a global database key. Together with an initialization vector (IV), a key stream is generated to encrypt the data in the database fields. But because strongMan did not generate individual IVs, every database field was encrypted using the same key stream. An attacker that has access to the database can use this to recover the encrypted credentials. In particular, because certificates, which have to be considered public information, are also encrypted using the same mechanism, an attacker can directly recover a large chunk of the key stream, which allows them to decrypt basically all other secrets especially ECDSA private keys and EAP secrets, which are usually a lot shorter. Version 0.2.0 fixes the issue by switching to AES-GCM-SIV encryption with a random nonce and an individually derived encryption key, using HKDF, for each encrypted value. Database migrations are provided to automatically re-encrypt all credentials.
Severity
8.7 (High)
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
SSVC
Exploitation: none Automatable: yes Technical Impact: partial
CISA Coordinator · CISA-ADP (v2.0.3)
Decision recorded 2026-02-20 15:32 UTC
CWE
  • CWE-323 - Reusing a Nonce, Key Pair in Encryption
  • CWE-1204 - Generation of Weak Initialization Vector (IV)
Assigner
GitHub_M CNA under the mitre root
CNA scorecard C 72/100 over 7868 records in the last 180 days details
References
Impacted products
Vendor Product Version CPE status
strongswan strongMan Affected: < 0.2.0
guessed Create a notification for this product.
Show details on NVD website
To clipboard 

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