CVE-2026-23965 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-347 vulnerability in sm-crypto. A fix is available for sm-crypto — see the affected versions and patch details below.
sm-crypto Affected by Signature Forgery in SM2-DSA
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-23965.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-23965 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 378,156 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
sm-cryptonpmDescription
sm-crypto provides JavaScript implementations of the Chinese cryptographic algorithms SM2, SM3, and SM4. A signature forgery vulnerability exists in the SM2 signature verification logic of sm-crypto prior to version 0.4.0. Under default configurations, an attacker can forge valid signatures for arbitrary public keys. If the message space contains sufficient redundancy, the attacker can fix the prefix of the message associated with the forged signature to satisfy specific formatting requirements. Version 0.4.0 patches the issue.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | sm-crypto | all versions | 0.4.0npm install sm-crypto@0.4.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for sm-crypto, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update sm-crypto to 0.4.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-23965 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2026-23965 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2026-23965. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-23965 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2026-23965 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.