Ddos 
The developers behind Meshtastic, the popular open-source LoRa mesh networking project, have issued a critical security advisory disclosing a cryptographic flaw that may allow attackers to decrypt private messages and gain unauthorized control over remote nodes. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-52464 (CVSSv4 9.5) and stemming from key duplication and insufficient randomness during key generation, affects multiple hardware platforms and could have serious implications for users relying on Meshtastic for secure, decentralized communication in remote or offline environments.
“It was discovered that the flashing procedure of several hardware vendors was resulting in duplicated public/private keys,” the advisory states.
Meshtastic enables long-range, low-power, decentralized communication without needing internet or cellular infrastructure. Designed for ESP32, nRF52, RP2040, and Linux-based devices, it supports features like:
- Text messaging
- GPS location sharing
- Sensor telemetry
- Remote node administration
Its applications span emergency response, off-grid expeditions, and preparedness communities, making security especially paramount.
Some hardware vendors appear to have shipped devices with identical key pairs due to cloning during mass flashing. This compromises the uniqueness of user identities within the mesh.
“When users with an affected key pair sent Direct Messages, those messages could be captured and decrypted by an attacker that has compiled the list of compromised keys,” the advisory explains.
Further investigation revealed that Meshtastic’s use of the rweather/crypto library was flawed on certain platforms. Specifically, it failed to initialize the internal randomness pool, resulting in low-entropy keys — an Achilles’ heel in cryptographic security.
The vulnerability also compromises remote administration, enabling attackers to hijack node permissions under certain conditions.
- If a compromised key is added as an administrator, anyone possessing the private key can issue commands.
- If a node itself has a compromised key, an attacker who knows an admin’s public key could derive the shared key and impersonate them.
“An attacker would have to determine the public key of an authorized administrator, and use the compromised private key to produce the resulting shared_key,” the advisory warns.
The Meshtastic team has issued version 2.6.11, which introduces the following changes:
- Warns users about compromised keys.
- Delays key generation until the LoRa region is first set — resolving the vendor cloning issue.
- Enhances entropy by adding multiple sources of randomness to the RNG initialization process.
A follow-up release, version 2.6.12, will automatically wipe known compromised keys when found.
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