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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.

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 / jose Hex.pm ↗ Repository ↗

≥ 1.0.0 < 1.11.13 affected
every other version: unaffected
cpe cpe:2.3:a:potatosalad:jose:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
version type semver
modules · source files · routines
modules jose_jwk_kty_ec
source files src/jwk/jose_jwk_kty_ec.erl
routines jose_jwk_kty_ec:verify/4

Affected — GitHub / potatosalad/erlang-jose Repository ↗

≥ a7746ec < 72ce186 affected
every other version: unaffected
cpe cpe:2.3:a:potatosalad:jose:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
version type git
modules · source files · routines
modules jose_jwk_kty_ec
source files src/jwk/jose_jwk_kty_ec.erl
routines jose_jwk_kty_ec:verify/4

References

Credits

Peter Ullrich Reporter
Andrew Bennett Remediation developer
Jonatan Männchen / EEF Analyst

CVSS breakdown

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