In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the DHIES implementation allowed the use of ECB mode. This mode is regarded as unsafe and support for it has been removed from the provider.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the ECIES implementation allowed the use of ECB mode. This mode is regarded as unsafe and support for it has been removed from the provider.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the other party DH public key is not fully validated. This can cause issues as invalid keys can be used to reveal details about the other party's private key where static Diffie-Hellman is in use. As of release 1.56 the key parameters are checked on agreement calculation.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider versions 1.51 to 1.55, a carry propagation bug was introduced in the implementation of squaring for several raw math classes have been fixed (org.bouncycastle.math.raw.Nat???). These classes are used by our custom elliptic curve implementations (org.bouncycastle.math.ec.custom.**), so there was the possibility of rare (in general usage) spurious calculations for elliptic curve scalar multiplications. Such errors would have been detected with high probability by the output validation for our scalar multipliers.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier DSA signature generation is vulnerable to timing attack. Where timings can be closely observed for the generation of signatures, the lack of blinding in 1.55, or earlier, may allow an attacker to gain information about the signature's k value and ultimately the private value as well.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the primary engine class used for AES was AESFastEngine. Due to the highly table driven approach used in the algorithm it turns out that if the data channel on the CPU can be monitored the lookup table accesses are sufficient to leak information on the AES key being used. There was also a leak in AESEngine although it was substantially less. AESEngine has been modified to remove any signs of leakage (testing carried out on Intel X86-64) and is now the primary AES class for the BC JCE provider from 1.56. Use of AESFastEngine is now only recommended where otherwise deemed appropriate.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier ECDSA does not fully validate ASN.1 encoding of signature on verification. It is possible to inject extra elements in the sequence making up the signature and still have it validate, which in some cases may allow the introduction of 'invisible' data into a signed structure.

In the Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the DSA key pair generator generates a weak private key if used with default values. If the JCA key pair generator is not explicitly initialised with DSA parameters, 1.55 and earlier generates a private value assuming a 1024 bit key size. In earlier releases this can be dealt with by explicitly passing parameters to the key pair generator.

In Bouncy Castle JCE Provider version 1.55 and earlier the DSA does not fully validate ASN.1 encoding of signature on verification. It is possible to inject extra elements in the sequence making up the signature and still have it validate, which in some cases may allow the introduction of 'invisible' data into a signed structure.

The default BKS keystore use an HMAC that is only 16 bits long, which can allow an attacker to compromise the integrity of a BKS keystore. Bouncy Castle release 1.47 changes the BKS format to a format which uses a 160 bit HMAC instead. This applies to any BKS keystore generated prior to BC 1.47. For situations where people need to create the files for legacy reasons a specific keystore type "BKS-V1" was introduced in 1.49. It should be noted that the use of "BKS-V1" is discouraged by the library authors and should only be used where it is otherwise safe to do so, as in where the use of a 16 bit checksum for the file integrity check is not going to cause a security issue in itself.