Padding Oracle Attack due to Observable Timing Discrepancy in jose-browser-runtime

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.