ECDSA signature length is not validated in jose, allowing signature malleability
What fixes it
A fixed version on one release line is not the upgrade target for every line. Check your exact version and any vendor backports.
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.
Text from CVE List
Affected versions 2
- joseaffected: 1.0.0 before 1.11.13CVE List
- joseaffected: a7746ecd4950f85a393136e449a91dac62b5c429 before 72ce1866622b9329347dc52a94173ac0317bc9cfCVE List
References 5
- github.com/potatosalad/erlang-jose/commit/a7746ecd4950f85a393136e449a91dac62b5c429Fixvia CVE List
- github.com/potatosalad/erlang-jose/commit/72ce1866622b9329347dc52a94173ac0317bc9cfFixvia CVE List
- github.com/potatosalad/erlang-jose/security/advisories/GHSA-44hw-rpw9-mwg4Advisoryvia CVE List
- cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-65632.htmlReferencevia CVE List
- osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-65632Referencevia CVE List