The pure-Erlang AES-GCM fallback in josejwaaes derives the number of verified authentication tag bits from the attacker-supplied tag itself.
CVE-2026-65625
The pure-Erlang AES-GCM fallback in josejwaaes derives the number of verified authentication tag bits from the attacker-supplied tag itself. In the {aesgcm, Bits} clause of blockdecrypt/4, the incoming tag is guarded only by isbinary/1, with no check on its length. Verification in gcmblockdecrypt/6 then computes TBits = bitsize(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.
Assessment
- CVSS
- 5.9 (v4.0)
- Severity
- Medium
- Known exploited
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Exploit availability
- Nothing found in Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or public PoC repositories
- Published
- 26 October 2026
- Last updated
- 27 October 2026
- Weakness
- CWE-354
- Assigner
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
CVSS vectorCVSS: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/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X
At the source
References
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-65625.html
- https://github.com/potatosalad/erlang-jose/commit/3fa1f8e3efda0da5ce6f4c9984789f979dc02740
- https://github.com/potatosalad/erlang-jose/commit/8848b172575fb7d7e1e2977e8ae0a21678d2157a
- https://github.com/potatosalad/erlang-jose/security/advisories/GHSA-6gxw-6f7r-cjr6
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-65625
Query this programmatically
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