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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 5.9 CVE-2021-29443 EUVD-2021-0764GHSA-58f5-hfqc-jgch

Padding Oracle Attack due to Observable Timing Discrepancy in jose

Published Apr 16, 2021 · Updated Aug 3, 2024 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

jose is an npm library providing a number of cryptographic operations. In vulnerable versions AES_CBC_HMAC_SHA2 Algorithm (A128CBC-HS256, A192CBC-HS384, A256CBC-HS512) decryption would always execute both HMAC tag verification and CBC decryption, if either failed `JWEDecryptionFailed` would be thrown. A possibly observable difference in timing when padding error would occur while decrypting the ciphertext makes a padding oracle and an adversary might be able to make use of that oracle to decrypt data without knowing the decryption key by issuing on average 128*b calls to the padding oracle (where b is the number of bytes in the ciphertext block). All major release versions have had a patch released which ensures the HMAC tag is verified before performing CBC decryption. The fixed versions are `^1.28.1 || ^2.0.5 || >=3.11.4`. Users should upgrade their v1.x dependency to ^1.28.1, their v2.x dependency to ^2.0.5, and their v3.x dependency to ^3.11.4. Thanks to Jason from Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR) for bringing this up and Eva Sarafianou (@esarafianou) for helping to score this advisory.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
panva jose < 1.28.1, >= 2.0.0, < 2.0.5, >= 3.0.0, < 3.11.4 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
npm jose >= 1.0.0, < 1.28.1 1.28.1 GHSA-58f5-hfqc-jgch
npm jose >= 2.0.0, < 2.0.5 2.0.5 GHSA-58f5-hfqc-jgch
npm jose >= 3.0.0, < 3.11.4 3.11.4 GHSA-58f5-hfqc-jgch

References