Is CVE-2026-81689 being exploited?

No public exploit is currently tracked.

How severe is CVE-2026-81689?

CVE-2026-81689 has a CVSS v3 severity of HIGH (7.5).

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CVE-2026-81689

Description

openssl_encrypt versions before 1.4.9 derive the remote-pepper wrap key using unsalted HKDF-SHA256 or bare SHA-256 of the password, allowing identical keys across all users and files. Attackers with access to wrapped pepper blobs can precompute a single dictionary table and perform fleet-wide offline password guessing at hardware speed to recover user passwords.