VulnerabilityDeferred

CVE-2026-65625

The pure-Erlang AES-GCM fallback in jose_jwa_aes derives the number of verified authentication tag bits from the attacker-supplied tag itself.

MEDIUM 5.9EPSS —

Does this matter?

Lower severity and no EPSS score yet. Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

The pure-Erlang AES-GCM fallback in jose_jwa_aes derives the number of verified authentication tag bits from the attacker-supplied tag itself. In the {aes_gcm, Bits} clause of block_decrypt/4, the incoming tag is guarded only by is_binary/1, with no check on its length. Verification in gcm_block_decrypt/6 then computes TBits = bit_size(T) and compares only those bits of the real 128-bit tag. An attacker who controls a JWE token can truncate the authentication tag to as little as 8 bits, so only 8 bits are ever checked. This reduces forgery resistance from 2^-128 to 2^-8, and a forged ciphertext is reliably accepted as authentic within 256 attempts without knowledge of the key (an authentication tag forgery and integrity bypass). Supplying a tag longer than 128 bits instead causes a badmatch that crashes the decrypting process. The fallback is reached through the public JWE decryption path whenever AES-GCM is not provided by a native crypto NIF, for example on FIPS or stripped or older OTP builds. This issue affects jose: from 1.2.0 before 1.11.13.

CVSS 4.0: 5.9 MEDIUMCVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:L/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: No score yet
Public exploits: None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-354
Source: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.