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Description

Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature in ueberauth guardian allows an unauthenticated attacker to revoke a victim's session with a forged token.

Guardian.revoke/3 in lib/guardian.ex decodes the supplied token with peek/1, which performs no signature verification (it only base64-decodes the JWT header and payload). The resulting unverified claims are forwarded directly to the configured token module's revoke callback and the implementation's on_revoke callback, a state-mutating sink. The sibling operations refresh/2 and exchange/4 both call decode_and_verify first, so the signature is checked before anything acts on the claims; revoke/3 is the only state-mutating path that acts on claims without verifying the signature.

An attacker who knows or guesses a victim's identifying claim values (jti, sub) can forge a JWT carrying those claims, sign it with an arbitrary key, and submit it to any endpoint that funnels a caller-supplied token into Guardian.revoke/3 (the standard logout / session-revocation pattern). When the token module mutates state keyed by the claims (whitelist deletion or blacklist insertion, for example a GuardianDb-style store), the victim's legitimate session is evicted. This is an unauthenticated session-revocation denial of service; the attacker never needs the signing secret.

This issue affects guardian: from 1.0.0 before 2.4.1.

Weaknesses & attack patterns

Weakness

CWE-347 · Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature in catalog → MITRE ↗

Attack patterns

CAPEC-475 · Signature Spoofing by Improper Validation MITRE ↗

Affected — Hex / guardian Hex.pm ↗ Repository ↗

1.0.0 < 2.4.1 affected
every other version: unaffected
default status unaffected
cpe cpe:2.3:a:ueberauth:guardian:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
modules · source files · routines
modules 'Elixir.Guardian'
source files lib/guardian.ex
routines 'Elixir.Guardian':revoke/3

Affected — GitHub / ueberauth/guardian Repository ↗

d652271 < 2bd7a8c affected
every other version: unaffected
default status unaffected
cpe cpe:2.3:a:ueberauth:guardian:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
modules · source files · routines
modules 'Elixir.Guardian'
source files lib/guardian.ex
routines 'Elixir.Guardian':revoke/3

Workarounds

Verify the token before revoking it: call decode_and_verify (or a verify-without-expiry variant, so already-expired tokens remain revocable) on the caller-supplied token and pass only tokens whose signature validates into Guardian.revoke/3. Reject tokens with an invalid signature at the application boundary.

Configurations

The application must route a caller-supplied token into Guardian.revoke/3 (for example a logout or session-revocation endpoint) and use a token module whose revoke / on_revoke callback mutates state keyed by the token claims (a whitelist that deletes by jti or a blacklist that inserts by jti, such as a GuardianDb-style store). With the default no-op on_revoke callback, no session state is changed and the issue is not exploitable.

References

Credits

Peter Ullrich Finder
Yordis Prieto Remediation developer
Jonatan Männchen / EEF Analyst

CVSS breakdown

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
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