erlang-jose RSA JWK parsing attempts to factor an attacker-controlled modulus, enabling CPU-exhaustion denial of service

Overview

Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity in erlang-jose allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to cause a CPU-exhaustion denial of service by submitting a crafted RSA JSON Web Key.

When an application parses an untrusted JWK through the public jose_jwk:from_binary/1 or jose_jwk:from_map/1 API (or the Elixir wrappers JOSE.JWK.from_binary/1 and JOSE.JWK.from_map/1), an RSA private key that supplies d, e, and n but omits all Chinese Remainder Theorem parameters (p, q, dp, dq, qi) is routed into convert_sfm_to_crt/1, which tries to recover the missing primes by factoring the modulus. The three integers are read straight from the base64url input and are never validated as a real RSA key. When the modulus cannot be split into two factors (for example, when it is itself prime), the search loop convert_sfm_to_crt_find_p/6 performs a modular exponentiation over the attacker-sized modulus on every iteration and never succeeds. A single request of a few hundred bytes forces close to one CPU-second of work before an internal one-second watchdog kills the worker, and a larger modulus raises the cost further. By flooding such requests an attacker can saturate every scheduler and deny service, without credentials, a valid RSA key, or any special configuration.

This issue affects jose: from 1.7.7 before 1.11.13.

Affected

• jose >= 1.7.7 < 1.11.13
• potatosalad/erlang-jose >= d19e1ba68d88c68d29aa942be2573a22dbafca1f < bfd336c0062bff93e65d08c22361897e96afd956

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.