VulnerabilityDeferred

CVE-2026-44699

In the OpenSSL backend, this causes HMAC verification to run with a zero-length key, so an attacker can forge a valid JWT without knowing any secret or RSA private key.

CRITICAL 9.1EPSS 0.21%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.21%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

LibJWT is a C JSON Web Token Library. From 3.0.0 to 3.3.2, libjwt accepts an RSA JWK that does not contain an alg parameter as the verification key for an HS256/HS384/HS512 token. In the OpenSSL backend, this causes HMAC verification to run with a zero-length key, so an attacker can forge a valid JWT without knowing any secret or RSA private key. This is an algorithm-confusion authentication bypass. It affects applications that load RSA keys from JWKS where alg is omitted, which is valid JWK syntax and common in real deployments, and then choose the verification algorithm from the JWT header, for example in a kid lookup callback. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.3.3.

CVSS 4.0: 9.1 CRITICALCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/M
EPSS: 0.21% probability · 11th percentile
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-327, CWE-347
Source: security-advisories@github.com

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.