Skip to content

Padding Oracle Attack due to Observable Timing Discrepancy in jose-browser-runtime

Moderate
panva published GHSA-94hh-pjjg-rwmr Apr 15, 2021

Package

npm jose-browser-runtime (npm)

Affected versions

<3.11.4

Patched versions

>=3.11.4

Description

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

A patch was released which ensures the HMAC tag is verified before performing CBC decryption. The fixed versions are >=3.11.4.

Users should upgrade 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.

Severity

Moderate
5.9
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
High
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
None
Availability
None
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

CVE ID

CVE-2021-29444