Critical CVSS 9.8
CVE-2026-16235
Crypt::Password versions through 0.28 for Perl generate insecure random values for salts. These versions use the built-in rand function, which is predictable and unsuitable for cryptography.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can read sensitive data, modify or destroy data and take the service offline.
- Weakness
- The random generator is predictable, making tokens and keys guessable.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doPatch without waiting for the next scheduled cycle. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.