U.S. flag   An official website of the United States government
Dot gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (Dot gov) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

National Vulnerability Database

National Vulnerability Database

NVD

National Vulnerability Database
  1. Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-48946 Detail

Description

liboqs is a C-language cryptographic library that provides implementations of post-quantum cryptography algorithms. liboqs prior to version 0.13.0 supports the HQC algorithm, an algorithm with a theoretical design flaw which leads to large numbers of malformed ciphertexts sharing the same implicit rejection value. Currently, no concrete attack on the algorithm is known. However, prospective users of HQC must take extra care when using the algorithm in protocols involving key derivation. In particular, HQC does not provide the same security guarantees as Kyber or ML-KEM. There is currently no patch for the HQC flaw available in liboqs, so HQC is disabled by default in liboqs starting from version 0.13.0. OQS will update its implementation after the HQC team releases an updated algorithm specification.


Metrics

 
NVD enrichment efforts reference publicly available information to associate vector strings. CVSS information contributed by other sources is also displayed.
CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

By selecting these links, you will be leaving NIST webspace. We have provided these links to other web sites because they may have information that would be of interest to you. No inferences should be drawn on account of other sites being referenced, or not, from this page. There may be other web sites that are more appropriate for your purpose. NIST does not necessarily endorse the views expressed, or concur with the facts presented on these sites. Further, NIST does not endorse any commercial products that may be mentioned on these sites. Please address comments about this page to [email protected].

URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://durumcrustulum.com/2024/02/24/how-to-hold-kems/#hqc GitHub, Inc. Product 
https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/liboqs/commit/a7d698ca9c9d98990647459253183cbe29c550af GitHub, Inc. Patch 
https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/liboqs/security/advisories/GHSA-3rxw-4v8q-9gq5 GitHub, Inc. Vendor Advisory 
https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/pqc-forum/c/Wiu4ZQo3fP80 GitHub, Inc. Issue Tracking  Mailing List 

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source
CWE-327 Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm GitHub, Inc.  

Known Affected Software Configurations Switch to CPE 2.2

CPEs loading, please wait.

Denotes Vulnerable Software
Are we missing a CPE here? Please let us know.

Change History

2 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2025-48946
NVD Published Date:
05/30/2025
NVD Last Modified:
08/25/2025
Source:
GitHub, Inc.