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Medium · 5.1 CVE-2026-65632 EEF-CVE-2026-65632EUVD-2026-110310GHSA-44hw-rpw9-mwg4GHSA-6g34-xwc5-pgxj

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

Published Oct 26, 2026 · Updated Nov 2, 2026 · Assigned by EEF

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.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
potatosalad jose 1.0.0 – < 1.11.13 1.11.13

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
Debian 14 erlang-jose 1.11.13-1 —
Debian 13 erlang-jose No fix yet —
Debian 12 erlang-jose No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 jose No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS jose No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS jose No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS jose No fix yet —
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS jose No fix yet —
Show 1 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS jose No fix yet —

Azure Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Azure Linux 3 jose +1 No fix yet —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Hex jose >= 1.0.0, < 1.11.13 1.11.13 EEF-CVE-2026-65632

References