Padding Oracle Attack due to Observable Timing Discrepancy in jose-node-esm-runtime
Published 19 Apr 2021 · Updated 8 Jul 2026
Affected package
- Affected
- <3.11.4
- Fixed in
- 3.11.4
npm install jose-node-esm-runtime@3.11.4Details
Impact
AES_CBC_HMAC_SHA2 Algorithm (A128CBC-HS256, A192CBC-HS384, A256CBC-HS512) decryption would always execute both HMAC tag verification and CBC decryption, if either failed JWEDecryptionFailed would be thrown. But a possibly observable difference in timing when padding error would occur while decrypting the ciphertext makes a padding oracle and an adversary might be able to make use of that oracle to decrypt data without knowing the decryption key by issuing on average 128*b calls to the padding oracle (where b is the number of bytes in the ciphertext block).
Patches
A patch was released which ensures the HMAC tag is verified before performing CBC decryption. The fixed versions are >=3.11.4.
Users should upgrade to ^3.11.4.
Credits
Thanks to Morgan Brown of Microsoft for bringing this up and Eva Sarafianou (@esarafianou) for helping to score this advisory.
Is GHSA-4v4g-726h-xvfv in any of your client repos?
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References
Advisory data from OSV.dev (opens OSV.dev in a new tab), refreshed daily.