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ECDSA signature validation vulnerability by accepting wrong ASN.1 encoding in jsrsasign

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Jun 23, 2020 in kjur/jsrsasign • Updated Jan 31, 2023

Package

npm jsrsasign (npm)

Affected versions

>= 4.0.0, < 8.0.19

Patched versions

8.0.19

Description

Impact

Jsrsasign supports ECDSA signature validation which signature value is represented by ASN.1 DER encoding. This vulnerablity may accept a wrong ASN.1 DER encoded ECDSA signature such as:

  • wrong multi-byte ASN.1 length of TLV (ex. 0x820045 even though 0x45 is correct)
  • prepending zeros with ASN.1 INTEGER value (ex. 0x00000123 even though 0x0123 is correct)
  • appending zeros to signature of ASN.1 TLV (ex. 0x3082....1fbc000000 even though 0x3082....1fbc, appending zeros are ignored.)

This vulnerability was fixed by strict ASN.1 DER checking.

Here is an assessment of this vulnerability:

  • If you are not use ECDSA signature validation, this vulnerability is not affected.
  • Not ASN.1 format signature like just concatenation of R and S value is not affected such as Bitcoin.
  • This vulnerability is affected to all ECC curve parameters.
  • Risk to accept a forged or crafted message to be signed is low.
  • Risk to raise memory corruption is low since jsrsasign uses BigInteger class.
  • ECDSA signatures semantically the same to valid one may be accepted as valid. There are many malleable variants.

As discussed here, there is no standards like X9.62 which requires ASN.1 DER. So ASN.1 BER can be applied to ECDSA however most of implementations like OpenSSL do strict ASN.1 DER checking.

Patches

Users using ECDSA signature validation should upgrade to 8.0.19.

Workarounds

Do strict ASN.1 DER checking for ASN.1 encoded ECDSA signature value.

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-14966
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-14966
https://vuldb.com/?id.157123
kjur/jsrsasign#437
https://kjur.github.io/jsrsasign/api/symbols/KJUR.crypto.ECDSA.html
https://kjur.github.io/jsrsasign/api/symbols/ASN1HEX.html#.checkStrictDER
https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-X.690

References

Published by the National Vulnerability Database Jun 22, 2020
@kjur kjur published to kjur/jsrsasign Jun 23, 2020
Reviewed Jun 26, 2020
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Jun 26, 2020
Last updated Jan 31, 2023

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

EPSS score

0.630%
(79th percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2020-14966

GHSA ID

GHSA-p8c3-7rj8-q963

Source code

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