Weak PBKDF2 parameters for password-encrypted private-key export in jose
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fixed in 1.11.13
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
Summary
The jose library, an Erlang/Elixir library for JSON Object Signing and Encryption, is affected when it exports password-encrypted private keys. Because the key-derivation settings are weak and cannot be changed by callers, an attacker who obtains an exported key file could guess the password offline and recover the full private key.
Summarized by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5. Verify details against the original sources.
Read the original description
Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort in the jose library allows an attacker who obtains a password-encrypted private-key export to recover the private key through an offline password-cracking attack. When jose exports a password-encrypted private key with jose_jwk:to_der/2 (JOSE.JWK.to_der/2), the jose_jwk_der:to_binary/3 function in src/jwk/jose_jwk_der.erl serializes the key as a PKCS#8 EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo using the PBES2 scheme with hardcoded key-derivation parameters: PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 with an iteration count of 2048 and an 8-byte (64-bit) random salt. Neither value can be overridden by the caller. Both values are far below current guidance (OWASP recommends on the order of 600,000 iterations for PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256, and NIST recommends salts of at least 128 bits), so the key-stretching work factor is roughly 300 times lower than intended and the short salt reduces the cost of precomputation across keys. The symmetric encryption (AES-256-CBC with a 16-byte random IV) is not affected; the weakness is entirely in the derivation strength. An attacker who obtains one of these exported blobs (for example from a backup, configuration repository, object storage, or logs) can mount a cheap offline dictionary or brute-force attack against the export password, and success yields the full private key. This issue affects jose: from 1.10.0 before 1.11.13.
Timeline
- CVE published
- First seen by cve.now
Affected versions
- jose
From 1.10.0 · fixed in 1.11.13
- potatosalad/erlang-jose
From 85fddd89ee56b6f9c19eff7d9cfffeef62c330b9 · fixed in 461b261902531ca016190e780bb70862d561a7e0
- joseHex
From 1.10.0 · fixed in 1.11.13