All vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-65632GHSA-44hw-rpw9-mwg4

ECDSA signature length is not validated in jose, allowing signature malleability

potatosalad jose
CVSS
5.1Medium
ExploitationNo known exploitationNot in CISA KEV, which does not prove it is unexploitedCISA KEV
Exploit odds (EPSS)No scoreNo FIRST EPSS score in this snapshot yet
Fixed in1.11.13Also 72ce1866622b9329347dc52a94173ac0317bc9cfCVE List
Published26 Oct 2026Updated 26 Oct 2026CVE List

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