CVE-2026-18036
An attacker able to measure that timing can recover information about the NTRU private key. modQ now masks, which is exact because q is always a power of two, and mod3 uses the reference implementation's division-free fold and select; the results are…
Does this matter?
High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.28%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.
Description
In Bouncy Castle for Java before 1.86, NTRU reduced secret values with the % operator in three helpers whose reference implementations are deliberately division-free, so each reduction was carried out by an integer division whose latency depends on the secret operand. Polynomial.modQ divided by a variable divisor, which a compiler cannot strength-reduce to a multiply the way it can a constant one, so it emitted a division on every call including on the decapsulation path where the dividend derives from the private key; Polynomial.mod3 and NTRUSampling.mod3 divided the secret key polynomials f and g during key generation, the message polynomials r and m during encapsulation, and coefficients recovered during decapsulation. An attacker able to measure that timing can recover information about the NTRU private key. modQ now masks, which is exact because q is always a power of two, and mod3 uses the reference implementation's division-free fold and select; the results are unchanged.
- CVSS 4.0
- 8.2 HIGHCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/M
- EPSS
- 0.28% probability · 21th percentile
- Public exploits
- None in Exploit-DB
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-208
- Source
- 91579145-5d7b-4cc5-b925-a0262ff19630
EPSS moved from 0.3% on 2 October 2026 to 0.3% on 26 October 2026.
References
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.