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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 6.6 CVE-2025-24976 EUVD-2025-3999GHSA-phw4-mc57-4hwcGO-2025-3460

Distribution's token authentication allows attacker to inject an untrusted signing key in a JWT

Published Feb 11, 2025 · Updated Jan 23, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Distribution is a toolkit to pack, ship, store, and deliver container content. Systems running registry versions 3.0.0-beta.1 through 3.0.0-rc.2 with token authentication enabled may be vulnerable to an issue in which token authentication allows an attacker to inject an untrusted signing key in a JSON web token (JWT). The issue lies in how the JSON web key (JWK) verification is performed. When a JWT contains a JWK header without a certificate chain, the code only checks if the KeyID (`kid`) matches one of the trusted keys, but doesn't verify that the actual key material matches. A fix for the issue is available at commit 5ea9aa028db65ca5665f6af2c20ecf9dc34e5fcd and expected to be a part of version 3.0.0-rc.3. There is no way to work around this issue without patching if the system requires token authentication.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
distribution distribution >= 3.0.0-beta.1, <= 3.0.0-rc.2 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Tumbleweed govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20250312T181707-1.1 openSUSE-SU-2025:14889-1

Wolfi

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Wolfi rolling kots +2 1.124.3-r1 —
Wolfi rolling zot 2.1.2-r2 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Go github.com/distribution/distribution all versions — GO-2025-3460

Advisories 1

References