CVE-2026-65632 MEDIUM

CVE-2026-65632: ECDSA signature length is not validated in jose, allowing signature malleability

Vendor Potatosalad
Product jose
Weakness CWE-347
Published October 26, 2026
Last update October 26, 2026

CVSS base score

5.1/10
Attack vector Local
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Confidentiality —
Integrity —

CVSS vector

CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

What the vulnerability does

01Description

The jose library accepts ECDSA (ES256, ES256K, ES384, and ES512) JWS signatures of a non-canonical length. When verifying an ECDSA signature, jose_jwk_kty_ec:verify/4 in src/jwk/jose_jwk_kty_ec.erl splits the raw signature in half by its actual byte length (split_binary(Signature, byte_size(Signature) div 2)) instead of enforcing the fixed length required by RFC 7518 §3.4, and then decodes each half with crypto:bytes_to_integer/1, which ignores leading zero bytes. As a result, an attacker who holds one valid token can prepend leading zero bytes to each of the R and S halves to produce longer signatures that still split evenly and decode to the same (r, s) pair, so many distinct signature byte strings all verify against the same key (signature malleability). This does not allow forging new payloads or impersonating a signer, because the underlying (r, s) values are unchanged. It does defeat any security control that assumes a valid token or its signature is unique, such as token-revocation-by-hash, replay or idempotency caches, and deduplication logic. This issue affects jose: from 1.0.0 before 1.11.13.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

October 26, 2026 CVE published

Related vulnerabilities

04Related CVE