NCryptDecapsulate function

2025-07-22

Note

Some information relates to a prerelease product which may be substantially modified before it's commercially released. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here. The feature described in this topic is available in pre-release versions of the Windows Insider Preview.

The NCryptDecapsulate function performs the Decapsulation operation of a Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM). It takes a KEM ciphertext and it decrypts with the provided private key, returning the shared secret key.

If the ciphertext is correctly formatted but does not match the decapsulation key, this API will succeed but a random shared secret key will be generated.

Syntax

SECURITY_STATUS NCryptDecapsulate (
 [in]    NCRYPT_KEY_HANDLE hKey,
 [in]    PCBYTE            pbCipherText,
 [in]    ULONG             cbCipherText,
 [out]   PBYTE             pbSecretKey,
 [in]    ULONG             cbSecretKey,
 [out]   ULONG             *pcbSecretKey,
 [in]    ULONG             dwFlags
);

Parameters

hKey [in]

The handle of the key to use for the decapsulation operation.

pbCipherText [in]

A pointer to a buffer that contains the KEM ciphertext. The NCryptEncapsulate function may be used to create a KEM ciphertext.

cbCipherText [in]

The size, in bytes, of the pbCipherText buffer.

pbSecretKey [out]

A pointer to a buffer that receives the shared secret key. See remarks for more information.

cbSecretKey [in]

The size, in bytes, of the pbSecretKey buffer.

pcbSecretKey [out]

A pointer to a ULONG variable that the receives the number of bytes written to pbSecretKey buffer.

If pbSecretKey is NULL, this receives the size, in bytes, required for the shared secret key. See remarks for more information.

dwFlags [in]

Reserved, must be zero.

Return value

Returns a status code that indicates the success or failure of the function.

Possible return codes include, but are not limited to, the following.

Return Code	Description
`ERROR_SUCCESS`	The function was successful.
`NTE_BAD_FLAGS`	The dwFlags parameter contains a value that is not valid.
`NTE_INVALID_PARAMETER`	One or more required parameters (hKey, pcbSecretKey, pcbCipherText) is NULL, or one of the parameters has an invalid value.
`NTE_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL`	An output buffer size (cbSecretKey) is too small for the result decapsulation operation for the KEM parameters associated with the decapsulation key. pcbSecretKey receives the number of bytes required for pbSecretKey.

Remarks

To query the required size of the pbSecretKey buffer needed for the KEM shared secret key, call NCryptDecapsulate with a NULL pbSecretKey. The required size will be returned in pcbSecretKey. This query is efficient and returns the size without performing the decapsulation. Equivalently, use NCryptGetProperty to query the NCRYPT_KEM_SHARED_SECRET_LENGTH_PROPERTY property of the algorithm or key handle. For currently supported KEM algorithms (ML-KEM), the shared secret length is a constant size for a given algorithm.

Additional remarks

Given an invalid, but correctly-sized, ciphertext, the ML-KEM decapsulation operation will implicitly reject the ciphertext by returning success in equal time to a valid decapsulation operation, with pseudo-random agreed secret output. This forces higher-level protocols to fail later when symmetric keys of peers don't match. So, decapsulate will only ever fail if there are programming errors (i.e. incorrect size, use of uninitialized hKey), or something fundamentally goes wrong with the environment (i.e. internal memory allocation fails, or self-test detect hardware error).

Requirements

Requirement	Value
Minimum supported client	Windows Insiders (build 27843): Support for ML-KEM begins. [desktop apps only]
Minimum supported server	Windows Insiders (build 27843): Support for ML-KEM begins. [desktop apps only]
Library	`Ncrypt.lib`
DLL	`Ncrypt.dll`

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