Attacker-controlled AES-GCM authentication tag length allows tag forgery in jose

The pure-Erlang AES-GCM fallback in jose_jwa_aes derives the number of verified authentication tag bits from the attacker-supplied tag itself. In the {aes_gcm, Bits} clause of block_decrypt/4, the incoming tag is guarded only by is_binary/1, with no check on its length. Verification in gcm_block_decrypt/6 then computes TBits = bit_size(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.

Source published

26 Oct 2026 19:52:54 UTC

Source modified

26 Oct 2026 19:52:54 UTC

Observed here

26 Oct 2026 20:35:31 UTC

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CVSS 4.0 · 5.9 CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N