Net::BitTorrent versions through 2.0.1 for Perl generate...
Moderate severity
Unreviewed
Published
Jun 30, 2026
to the GitHub Advisory Database
•
Updated Jun 30, 2026
Description
Published by the National Vulnerability Database
Jun 30, 2026
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database
Jun 30, 2026
Last updated
Jun 30, 2026
Net::BitTorrent versions through 2.0.1 for Perl generate the MSE Diffie-Hellman private key with a non-cryptographic PRNG.
The MSE (Message Stream Encryption) handshake derives its 160-bit Diffie-Hellman private key from Perl's rand(), a non-cryptographic drand48-class generator seeded once per process, in KeyExchange.pm. The shared secret and the RC4 keys derived from it (the SHA-1 of "keyA" or "keyB", the shared secret, and the infohash) therefore depend entirely on a predictable PRNG. The same handshake sends, in cleartext, random padding drawn from the same rand() sequence in _random_pad, immediately after the public key and the private-key draw.
A passive observer of the handshake recovers the PRNG state from the cleartext padding, reconstructs the private key, computes the shared secret from the peer's public key on the wire, derives the RC4 keys, and decrypts the connection, defeating the passive-observation obfuscation MSE provides.
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