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Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature

CVE-2019-11841

Severity Medium
Score 5.9/10

Summary

A message-forgery issue was discovered in "crypto/openpgp/clearsign/clearsign.go" in supplementary Go cryptography libraries. According to the OpenPGP Message Format specification in RFC 4880 chapter 7, a cleartext signed message can contain one or more optional "Hash" Armor Headers. The "Hash" Armor Header specifies the message digest algorithm(s) used for the signature. However, the Go clearsign package ignores the value of this header, which allows an attacker to spoof it. Consequently, an attacker can lead a victim to believe the signature was generated using a different message digest algorithm than what was actually used. Moreover, since the library skips Armor Header parsing in general, an attacker can not only embed arbitrary Armor Headers, but also prepend arbitrary text to cleartext messages without invalidating the signatures. This vulnerability affects golang.org/x/crypto versions prior to 0.1.0.

  • HIGH
  • NETWORK
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE

CWE-347 - Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature

A cryptographic protocol is meant to ensure that services are provided in a secure manner. An application with absent or improper verification of cryptographic signatures allows malicious users to feed false messages to valid users or to disclose sensitive data, subverting the goals of the protocol. This can lead to security failures such as false authentication, account hijacking, and privilege escalation.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published