Unchecked Return Value Affecting openssl-encrypt package, versions [,1.4.0)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
critical
0
10

CVSS assessment by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.34% (27th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-PYTHON-OPENSSLENCRYPT-19428130
  • published29 Aug 2026
  • disclosed17 Aug 2026
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 17 Aug 2026

NewCVE-2026-74900  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-252  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade openssl-encrypt to version 1.4.0 or higher.

Overview

openssl-encrypt is an A package for secure file encryption and decryption based on modern ciphers using heavy-compute-load chaining of hashing and KDF to generate strong encryption password based on users provided password to ensure secure encryption of files

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Unchecked Return Value in the pqc.py process. An attacker can recover the shared secret and decrypt all ciphertext by obtaining 16 bytes of the private key and leveraging publicly available encapsulated key data, as the fallback mechanism triggers on any KEM decapsulation failure without raising an error.

CVSS Base Scores

version 4.0
version 3.1