Tag: jose

CVE-2022-21449: Psychic Signatures in Java

The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, this being Doctor Who, the card is really made out of a special “psychic paper“, which causes the person looking at it to see whatever the Doctor wants them to see: a security pass, a warrant, or whatever.

Doctor Who holding up a blank ID card with a badly superimposed image of Duke (the Java mascot) holding a glass of wine.
“Looks legit to me. Hic!“

It turns out that some recent releases of Java were vulnerable to a similar kind of trick, in the implementation of widely-used ECDSA signatures. If you are running one of the vulnerable versions then an attacker can easily forge some types of SSL certificates and handshakes (allowing interception and modification of communications), signed JWTs, SAML assertions or OIDC id tokens, and even WebAuthn authentication messages. All using the digital equivalent of a blank piece of paper.

It’s hard to overstate the severity of this bug. If you are using ECDSA signatures for any of these security mechanisms, then an attacker can trivially and completely bypass them if your server is running any Java 15, 16, 17, or 18 version before the April 2022 Critical Patch Update (CPU). For context, almost all WebAuthn/FIDO devices in the real world (including Yubikeys*) use ECDSA signatures and many OIDC providers use ECDSA-signed JWTs.

If you have deployed Java 15, Java 16, Java 17, or Java 18 in production then you should stop what you are doing and immediately update to install the fixes in the April 2022 Critical Patch Update.

Update: the official announcement from Oracle also lists older versions of Java, including 7, 8 and 11. Although I’m not aware of the bug impacting those older implementations they did fix a similar bug in the (non-EC) DSA implementation at the same time, so it’s possible older versions are also impacted. There are also other security vulnerabilities reported in the same CPU, so (as always) it is worth upgrading even if you are running an older Java version. The OpenJDK advisory on the other hand lists only versions 15, 17, and 18 as affected by this specific issue (CVE-2022-21449).

Update 2: Oracle have informed me they are in the process of correcting the advisory to state that only versions 15-18 are impacted. The CVE has already been updated. Note that 15 and 16 are no longer supported, so it will only list 17 and 18 as impacted.

Continue reading “CVE-2022-21449: Psychic Signatures in Java”

Key-driven cryptographic agility

One of the criticisms of the JOSE/JWT standards is that they give an attacker too much flexibility, by allowing them to specify how a message should be processed. In particular, the standard “alg” header tells the recipient what cryptographic algorithm was used to sign or encrypt the contents. Letting the attacker chose the algorithm can lead to disastrous security vulnerabilities. Continue reading “Key-driven cryptographic agility”

So how *do* you validate (NIST) ECDH public keys?

Updated 20th July 2017 to clarify notation for the point of infinity. A previous version used the symbol 0 (zero) rather than O, which may have been confusing.

Updated 28th May 2020: in step 4 of the full validation check, n is the order of the prime sub-group defined by the generator point G, not the order of the curve itself. This is critical for security if you are performing this check because small-order points will satisfy the order of the curve (which is h * n), but not the order of G.

In the wake of the recent critical security vulnerabilities in some JOSE/JWT libraries around ECDH public key validation, a number of implementations scrambled to implement specific validation of public keys to eliminate these attacks. But how do we know whether these checks are sufficient? Is there any guidance on what checks should be performed? The answer is yes, but it can be a bit hard tracking down exactly what validation needs to be done in which cases. For modern elliptic curve schemes like X25519 and Ed25519, there is some debate over whether validation should be performed at all in the basic primitive implementations, as the curve eliminates some of the issues while high-level protocols can be designed to eliminate others. However, for the NIST standard curves used in JOSE, the question is more clear cut: it is absolutely critical that public keys are correctly validated, as evidenced by the linked security alert.

Continue reading “So how *do* you validate (NIST) ECDH public keys?”

Should you use JWT/JOSE?

In the wake of some more recent attacks against popular JSON Web Token (JWT)/JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) libraries, there has been some renewed criticism of the JWT/JOSE standards themselves (see also discussion on lobste.rs with an excellent comment from Thomas Ptacek summarising some of the problems with the standard). Given these criticisms, should you use JOSE at all? Are articles like my recent “best practices” one just encouraging adoption of bad standards that should be left to die a death?

Certainly, there are lots of potential gotchas in the specs, and it is easy for somebody without experience to shoot themselves in the foot using these standards. I agree with pretty much all of the criticisms levelled against the standards. They are too complicated with too many potentially insecure options. It is far too easy to select insecure combinations or misconfigure them. Indeed, much of the advice in my earlier article can be boiled down to limiting which options you use, understanding what security properties those options do and do not provide, and completely ignoring some of the more troublesome aspects of the spec. If you followed my advice of using “headless” JWTs and direct authenticated encryption with a symmetric key, you’d end up not far off from the advice of just encrypting a JSON object with libsodium or using Fernet.

So in that sense, I am already advocating for not really using the specs as-is, at least not without significant work to understand them and how they fit with your requirements. But there are some cases where using JWTs still makes sense:

  • If you need to implement a standard that mandates their use, such as OpenID Connect. In this case you do not have much of a choice.
  • If you need to interoperate with third-party software that is already using JWTs. Again, in this case you also do not have a choice.
  • You have complex requirements mandating particular algorithms/parameters (e.g. NIST/FIPS-approved algorithms) and don’t want to hand-roll a message format or are required to use something with a “standard”. In this case, JWT/JOSE is not a terrible choice, so long as you know what you are doing (and I hope you do if you are in this position).

If you do have a choice, then you should think hard about whether you need the complexity of JWTs or can use a simpler approach that takes care of most of the choices for you or store state on the server and use opaque cookies. In addition to the options mentioned in the referenced posts, I would also like to mention Macaroons, which can be a good alternative for some authorization token use-cases and the existing libraries tend to build on solid foundations (libsodium/NaCl).

So, should you use JWT/JOSE at all? In many cases the answer is no, and you should use a less error-prone alternative. If you do need to use them, then make sure you know what you are doing.

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