CVE-2026-61618
Description
A flaw was found in snark-verifier. Accumulator limbs are decoded without consistently enforcing canonical bounds before reconstructing elliptic-curve coordinates. A remote attacker can exploit this flaw by submitting proofs with non-canonical encodings, causing the native verifier to panic and crash rather than returning a standard verification error, leading to a Denial of Service (DoS).
Statement
This vulnerability is rated as having Moderate severity because successful exploitation requires delivering specialized malformed proofs that trigger an unexpected panic, terminating the verifying process without affecting system confidentiality or integrity. Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not include or support the snark-verifier component, isolating core enterprise environments from direct exposure. In addition, the blast radius is strictly confined to process termination in custom cryptographic workloads, with practical impact further bounded where upstream circuit constraints are already applied.
Mitigation
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Availability
Technical Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
While assertion is good for catching logic errors and reducing the chances of reaching more serious vulnerability conditions, an attacker can still cause a denial of service if they can trigger an assert statement, and if the scope of the assert() extends beyond the attacker's own session. For example, if a server handles multiple simultaneous connections, if an assert() occurs in one single connection that causes all other connections to be dropped, this could be a significant denial of service.
Frequently Asked Questions
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