Joserfc

joserfc is a Python library that provides an implementation of several JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) standards. In 1.6.2 and earlier, a resource exhaustion vulnerability in joserfc allows an unauthenticated attacker to cause a Denial of Service (DoS) via CPU exhaustion. When the library decrypts a JSON Web Encryption (JWE) token using Password-Based Encryption (PBES2) algorithms, it reads the p2c (PBES2 Count) parameter directly from the token's protected header. This parameter defines the number of iterations for the PBKDF2 key derivation function. Because joserfc does not validate or bound this value, an attacker can specify an extremely large iteration count (e.g., 2^31 - 1), forcing the server to expend massive CPU resources processing a single token. This vulnerability exists at the JWA layer and impacts all high-level JWE and JWT decryption interfaces if PBES2 algorithms are allowed by the application's policy.

Published: 2026-03-03T22:48:21.306Z
Updated: 2026-03-04T21:20:55.097Z

joserfc is a Python library that provides an implementation of several JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) standards. In versions from 1.3.3 to before 1.3.5 and from 1.4.0 to before 1.4.2, the ExceededSizeError exception messages are embedded with non-decoded JWT token parts and may cause Python logging to record an arbitrarily large, forged JWT payload. In situations where a misconfigured — or entirely absent — production-grade web server sits in front of a Python web application, an attacker may be able to send arbitrarily large bearer tokens in the HTTP request headers. When this occurs, Python logging or diagnostic tools (e.g., Sentry) may end up processing extremely large log messages containing the full JWT header during the joserfc.jwt.decode() operation. The same behavior also appears when validating claims and signature payload sizes, as the library raises joserfc.errors.ExceededSizeError() with the full payload embedded in the exception message. Since the payload is already fully loaded into memory at this stage, the library cannot prevent or reject it. This issue has been patched in versions 1.3.5 and 1.4.2.

Published: 2025-11-18T23:07:44.328Z
Updated: 2025-11-19T17:12:04.336Z