CVE-2026-40194

phpseclib is a PHP secure communications library. Prior to 3.0.51, 2.0.53, and 1.0.28, phpseclib\Net\SSH2::get_binary_packet() uses PHP's != operator to compare a received SSH packet HMAC against the locally computed HMAC. != on equal-length binary strings in PHP uses memcmp(), which short-circuits on the first differing byte. This is a real variable-time comparison (CWE-208), proven by scaling benchmarks. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.0.51, 2.0.53, and 1.0.28.