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Medium · 5.3 RUSTSEC-2026-0199

Panic in `bcrypt::verify` on non-ASCII hash input

Published Jun 20, 2026 · Updated Jul 4, 2026 · Assigned by RUSTSEC

Description

`bcrypt::verify(password, hash)` and `HashParts::from_str(hash)` panic in
`str::slice_error_fail` when given a 60-byte `&str` containing a multi-byte
UTF-8 character at certain byte positions.

## Impact

Any Rust code that calls `bcrypt::verify` (or `HashParts::from_str`) with an
attacker-controlled hash string will panic. The `bcrypt` crate is
`#![forbid(unsafe_code)]`, so this is limited to a denial-of-service and
cannot lead to memory corruption.

Realistic attack contexts include:

- Rust authentication services reading hashes from a database that was
previously compromised via, e.g., SQL injection. The attacker can then
crash the service on every login attempt against the tampered account.
- CLI tools accepting hashes from stdin or command-line arguments.
- Password managers or vault services loading hashes from untrusted
configuration sources.

## Root cause

`split_hash` performed five `&str` slicing operations on the input hash:
`&hash[1..3]`, `&hash[4..6]`, `&hash[7..]`, `&salt_and_hash[..22]`, and
`&salt_and_hash[22..]`. None of these were char-boundary-checked. Any input
where a multi-byte UTF-8 character spanned one of those byte positions
caused a panic.

This is a regression of the fix originally shipped in 2021 for issue #62
(commit `0833509`). The regression was introduced in the parser rewrite in
PR #95 (commit `e9a8394`, released as 0.19.0).

The pre-existing regression test `does_no_error_on_char_boundary_splitting`
was not removed, but was silently rendered ineffective by the new
`bytes[0] != b'$'` guard, which rejected its input earlier and prevented
it from reaching the buggy slices — leaving CI green through the regression.

## Fix

`split_hash` now rejects any hash string containing non-ASCII bytes up
front. A valid bcrypt hash is always exactly 60 ASCII bytes, so this
closes the entire class of byte-boundary panics rather than guarding each
slice individually.

The fix was merged in PR #103 and released as `bcrypt 0.19.2` on 2026-06-20.

## Downstream impact

`pyca/bcrypt` (which depended on `bcrypt 0.19.1`) is **not** affected. Its
Python-side wrapper performs its own byte-level salt parsing before
invoking `bcrypt::hash_with_salt`, and never reaches the buggy code path
in `split_hash` or `verify`.

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
crates.io bcrypt >= 0.19.0, < 0.19.2 0.19.2 RUSTSEC-2026-0199

References