Meshtastic is an open source mesh networking solution. The Meshtastic firmware (starting from version 2.5) introduces asymmetric encryption (PKI) for direct messages, but when the pki_encrypted flag is missing, the firmware silently falls back to legacy AES-256-CTR channel encryption. This was an intentional decision to maintain backwards compatibility.

However, the end-user applications, like Web app, iOS/Android app, and applications built on top of Meshtastic using the SDK, did not have a way to differentiate between end-to-end encrypted DMs and the legacy DMs. This creates a downgrade attack path where adversaries who know a shared channel key can craft and inject spoofed direct messages that are displayed as if they were PKC encrypted. Users are not given any feedback of whether a direct message was decrypted with PKI or with legacy symmetric encryption, undermining the expected security guarantees of the PKI rollout.

Version 2.7.15 fixes this issue.