go-jose up to 3.0.4/4.1.3 on JSON cipher.KeyUnwrap uncaught exception

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in go-jose up to 3.0.4/4.1.3 on JSON. It has been rated as problematic. Affected by this issue is the function cipher.KeyUnwrap. The manipulation leads to uncaught exception. This vulnerability is referenced as CVE-2026-34986. Remote exploitation of the attack is possible. No exploit is available. Upgrading the affected component is advised.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as problematic, has been found in go-jose up to 3.0.4/4.1.3 on JSON. This issue affects the function cipher.KeyUnwrap. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a uncaught exception vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-248. An exception is thrown from a function, but it is not caught. Impacted is availability. The summary by CVE is:

Go JOSE provides an implementation of the Javascript Object Signing and Encryption set of standards in Go, including support for JSON Web Encryption (JWE), JSON Web Signature (JWS), and JSON Web Token (JWT) standards. Prior to 4.1.4 and 3.0.5, decrypting a JSON Web Encryption (JWE) object will panic if the alg field indicates a key wrapping algorithm (one ending in KW, with the exception of A128GCMKW, A192GCMKW, and A256GCMKW) and the encrypted_key field is empty. The panic happens when cipher.KeyUnwrap() in key_wrap.go attempts to allocate a slice with a zero or negative length based on the length of the encrypted_key. This code path is reachable from ParseEncrypted() / ParseEncryptedJSON() / ParseEncryptedCompact() followed by Decrypt() on the resulting object. Note that the parse functions take a list of accepted key algorithms. If the accepted key algorithms do not include any key wrapping algorithms, parsing will fail and the application will be unaffected. This panic is also reachable by calling cipher.KeyUnwrap() directly with any ciphertext parameter less than 16 bytes long, but calling this function directly is less common. Panics can lead to denial of service. This vulnerability is fixed in 4.1.4 and 3.0.5.

The advisory is shared at github.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-34986 since 03/31/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be initiated remotely. No form of authentication is needed for a successful exploitation. Technical details are known, but no exploit is available.

The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 306612 (Fedora 43 : moby-engine (2026-a5015b57b9)), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment.

Upgrading to version 3.0.5 or 4.1.4 eliminates this vulnerability.

The vulnerability is also documented in the databases at CNNVD (CNNVD-202604-991), Tenable (306612) and CERT Bund (WID-SEC-2026-1268). If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

Affected

• Amazon Linux 2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Fedora Linux
• SUSE Linux
• Oracle Linux
• SUSE openSUSE
• RESF Rocky Linux
• IBM MQ
• Red Hat OpenShift
• Splunk Splunk Enterprise

Productinfo

Name

• go-jose

Version

• 3.0.0
• 3.0.1
• 3.0.2
• 3.0.3
• 3.0.4
• 4.1.0
• 4.1.1
• 4.1.2
• 4.1.3

Website

• Product: https://github.com/go-jose/go-jose/

CPE 2.3info

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CPE 2.2info

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