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Observable Discrepancy

CVE-2021-29443

Medium
5.9/10

Summary

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. This issue affects the versions 1.0.x prior to 1.28.1, 2.0.x prior to 2.0.5 and 3.0.x prior to 3.11.4.

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

CWE-203 - Observable Discrepancy

The product behaves differently or sends different responses under different circumstances in a way that is observable to an unauthorized actor, which exposes security-relevant information about the state of the product, such as whether a particular operation was successful or not.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published