Padding Oracle Attack due to Observable Timing Discrepancy in jose
Affected releases · jose
- 3.x3.0.0 – 3.11.3Fixed in 3.11.4
- 2.x2.0.0 – 2.0.4Fixed in 2.0.5
- 1.x1.9.2 – 1.28.0Fixed in 1.28.1
On 3.x, the newest line:
npm install jose@3.11.4Not affected
6.0.0 – 6.2.13
32 releases, latest
Affected
3.0.0 – 3.11.3
29 releases
Fixed
3.11.4 – 3.20.4
29 releases
Affected
2.0.0 – 2.0.4
5 releases
Fixed
2.0.5 – 2.0.7
3 releases
Affected
1.9.2 – 1.28.0
40 releases
Fixed
1.28.1 – 1.28.2
2 releases
Is your project affected?
Paste your package.json, or type the range you declare for jose. It is read in your browser and sent nowhere.
What happens
jose is an npm library providing a number of cryptographic operations.
Impact
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. But 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).
Patches
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
Credits
Thanks to Morgan Brown of Microsoft for bringing this up and Eva Sarafianou (@esarafianou) for helping to score this advisory.