ECDSA signature length is not validated in jose, allowing signature malleability
- 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- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean?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 library for JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JWS/JWT) that verifies ECDSA-signed tokens (ES256, ES256K, ES384, ES512), is affected. Because it does not enforce the fixed signature length, an attacker holding one valid token can create many differently encoded versions of the same signature, which can bypass controls that rely on each token's signature being unique, such as revocation lists, replay protection, and deduplication.
Summarized by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5. Verify details against the original sources.
Read the original description
The jose library accepts ECDSA (ES256, ES256K, ES384, and ES512) JWS signatures of a non-canonical length. When verifying an ECDSA signature, jose_jwk_kty_ec:verify/4 in src/jwk/jose_jwk_kty_ec.erl splits the raw signature in half by its actual byte length (split_binary(Signature, byte_size(Signature) div 2)) instead of enforcing the fixed length required by RFC 7518 §3.4, and then decodes each half with crypto:bytes_to_integer/1, which ignores leading zero bytes. As a result, an attacker who holds one valid token can prepend leading zero bytes to each of the R and S halves to produce longer signatures that still split evenly and decode to the same (r, s) pair, so many distinct signature byte strings all verify against the same key (signature malleability). This does not allow forging new payloads or impersonating a signer, because the underlying (r, s) values are unchanged. It does defeat any security control that assumes a valid token or its signature is unique, such as token-revocation-by-hash, replay or idempotency caches, and deduplication logic. This issue affects jose: from 1.0.0 before 1.11.13.
Timeline
- CVE published
- First seen by cve.now
Affected versions
- jose
From 1.0.0 · fixed in 1.11.13
- potatosalad/erlang-jose
From a7746ecd4950f85a393136e449a91dac62b5c429 · fixed in 72ce1866622b9329347dc52a94173ac0317bc9cf
- joseHex
From 1.0.0 · fixed in 1.11.13