CVE-2021-29443

MEDIUM5.9EPSS 0.32%

Padding Oracle Attack due to Observable Timing Discrepancy in jose

Published: 4/19/2021Modified: 3/13/2026
Also known as:GHSA-58f5-hfqc-jgch

Description

jose is an npm library providing a number of cryptographic operations. ### Impact [AES_CBC_HMAC_SHA2 Algorithm](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7518#section-5.2) (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`](https://github.com/panva/jose/releases/tag/v1.28.1), their v2.x dependency to [`^2.0.5`](https://github.com/panva/jose/releases/tag/v2.0.5), and their v3.x dependency to [`^3.11.4`](https://github.com/panva/jose/releases/tag/v3.11.4) ### Credits Thanks to Morgan Brown of Microsoft for bringing this up and Eva Sarafianou (@esarafianou) for helping to score this advisory.

Affected packages (1)

CVSS scores

SourceVersionSeverityVector
osvCVSS 3.1MEDIUM5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

References (3)