Skip to main content
Live Webinar with SANS (June 25)— Agentic CTI Automation for Fun & ProfitRegister Free
Mallory
Medium

OpenSSL low-level OCB trailing bytes left unencrypted and unauthenticated

IdentifiersCVE-2025-69418CWE-345

CVE-2025-69418 is a flaw in OpenSSL's low-level OCB implementation affecting hardware-accelerated code paths such as AES-NI when applications call CRYPTO_ocb128_encrypt() or CRYPTO_ocb128_decrypt() directly with input lengths that are not a multiple of 16 bytes in a single call. In the vulnerable stream path, full 16-byte blocks are processed but the input/output pointers are not advanced correctly. The subsequent tail-handling logic then operates on the original base pointers instead of the true trailing partial block. As a result, the actual final 1 to 15 bytes of the message may remain unencrypted during encryption and are excluded from the OCB authentication checksum/tag computation. The issue affects OpenSSL 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.0, and 1.1.1. OpenSSL 1.0.2 is not affected. Typical consumers using the EVP API are not affected because EVP/provider OCB implementations split full blocks and partial tails into separate calls, avoiding the vulnerable path. TLS is also not affected because it does not use OCB ciphersuites. FIPS modules in 3.0 through 3.6 are not affected because OCB is not FIPS-approved and is outside those module boundaries.

Share:
For your environment

Are you exposed to this one?

Mallory correlates every CVE against your assets, your vendors, and active adversary campaigns. Know which vulnerabilities matter for you, not just which ones are loud.

ANALYST BRIEF

Impact, mitigation & remediation

What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.

Impact

What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.

Successful exploitation causes a confidentiality and integrity failure for the trailing partial block of an OCB-protected message. Specifically, the final 1 to 15 bytes may be exposed in cleartext on encryption and are not covered by the authentication tag, allowing an attacker who can observe or modify the ciphertext to read those bytes and tamper with them without detection. The issue does not inherently provide code execution or privilege escalation; the primary impact is undetected disclosure and modification of the message tail in affected application-specific uses of the low-level API.

Mitigation

If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.

If immediate patching is not possible, avoid invoking CRYPTO_ocb128_encrypt() or CRYPTO_ocb128_decrypt() with non-16-byte-aligned lengths in a single call on hardware-accelerated builds. Prefer EVP/provider OCB APIs, which avoid the vulnerable path. If low-level OCB must be used temporarily, ensure callers process full 16-byte blocks separately from any trailing partial block rather than passing mixed-length input in one call. Also review whether OCB mode is enabled or used at all in the application, since typical EVP users and TLS deployments are not affected.

Remediation

Patch, then assume compromise.

Upgrade OpenSSL to a fixed release in the affected branch. The provided content indicates fixes were released on 2026-01-27 in OpenSSL 3.6.1, 3.5.5, 3.4.4, 3.3.6, 3.0.19, and 1.1.1ze. Vendor-integrated products should be updated to the vendor-supplied remediated build. Where application code directly uses the low-level OCB API, refactor to use the higher-level EVP/provider OCB interfaces instead of CRYPTO_ocb128_encrypt() and CRYPTO_ocb128_decrypt().
PUBLIC EXPLOITS

Exploits

No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.

VALID 0 / 0 TOTALView more in app

No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.

EXPOSURE SURFACE

Affected products & vendors

Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.

VendorProductType
FreebsdFreebsdapplication
OpenSSL Software FoundationOpensslapplication

Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.

What this page doesn’t show

The version that knows your environment.

This page is what’s public. Mallory adds the parts that aren’t: which of your assets are affected, which adversaries are exploiting it right now, which detections to deploy, and what to do tonight.
Exposure mapping

Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.

Threat actor evidence

Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.

Associated malware

Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.

Detection signatures

YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.

Vendor-by-vendor mapping

Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.

Social activity15

Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.