Native entropy source retries the CPU entropy instructions without limit

Description

In Bouncy Castle for Java FIPS (BC-FJA) before bc-fips 2.1.3, the native entropy source used on Intel platforms retried the CPU entropy instructions without any bound. RDSEED and RDRAND report failure through their carry flag, and the JNI seeding routine spun re-issuing the instruction for as long as that flag stayed clear, so a persistent failure of the on-chip entropy source - whether from a hardware fault, from the underlying DRBG being exhausted by contention across many cores, or from a hypervisor that does not provide the instruction - left the calling thread looping indefinitely inside the JNI call, where it could be neither interrupted nor timed out. Any operation drawing from the native entropy source could therefore hang, denying service to the application. The retry loops are now bounded (200 attempts for RDSEED and 20 for RDRAND, twice the baselines given in Intel's Digital Random Number Generator software implementation guide), pausing between attempts and, on exhaustion, clearing any partially written buffer and throwing rather than continuing to spin. The clear is performed by an un-elidable memzero, which uses a volatile pointer and an assembly memory barrier so that a compiler cannot optimise the erase away as a dead store. Bouncy Castle for Java (bcprov) is not affected, as it has no native entropy source; the 1.0.X and 2.0.X FIPS series are not affected.

Scores

EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)

0.43% · top 63% of all CVEs (6 Nov 2026)

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial

The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: High 8.7.

Weakness

• CWE-835 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition ('Infinite Loop') (opens in a new tab)All about CWE-835 and its CVEs

Affected products

• Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. · BC-FJA

  • affected 2.1.0 – < 2.1.3

Affected packages

From reviewed advisories of the GitHub Advisory Database.

• Mavenorg.bouncycastle:bc-fipsGHSA-v6w3-qrh8-qccc (opens in a new tab)

References (1)

• https://github.com/bcgit/bc-java/wiki/CVE%E2%80%902026%E2%80%908798 (opens in a new tab)vendor-advisory

Sources

The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.

• CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
• CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
• NVD (opens in a new tab)
• FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
• OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
• GitHub Advisory GHSA-v6w3-qrh8-qccc (opens in a new tab)
• CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)

Badge for a README or a ticket

[![CVE-2026-8798](https://trackcve.app/badge/CVE-2026-8798.svg)](https://trackcve.app/cve/CVE-2026-8798)

Record last updated 10 Aug 2026, 18:23 UTC.