Description

Parsing JSON serialized payload without protected field can lead to segfault

Summary

Calling jws.Parse with a JSON serialized payload where the signature field is present while protected is absent can lead to a nil pointer dereference.

Details

This seems to also affect other functions that calls Parse internally, like jws.Verify.

My understanding of these functions from the docs is that they are supposed to fail gracefully on invalid input and don't require any prior validation.

Based on the stack trace in the PoC, the issue seems to be that the processing done in jws/message.go:UnmarshalJSON() assumes that if a signature field is present, then a protected field is also present. If this is not the case, then the subsequent call to getB64Value(sig.protected) will dereference sig.protected, which is nil.

PoC

Reproducer:

package poc

import (
        "testing"

        "github.com/lestrrat-go/jwx/v2/jws"
)
...
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Result:

$ go test        
--- FAIL: TestPOC (0.00s)
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference [recovered]
        panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x40 pc=0x5fd618]

goroutine 6 [running]:
testing.tRunner.func1.2({0x628800, 0x831030})...
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Impact

The vulnerability can be used to crash / DOS a system doing JWS verification.

Mitigation

Aliases

References