Eclipse Jetty Digest Authentication Server-side improper authentication

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability has been found in Eclipse Jetty and classified as critical. This impacts an unknown function of the component Digest Authentication Server-side. This manipulation causes improper authentication. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2026-10050. The attack can be initiated remotely. There is not any exploit available.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Eclipse Jetty (the affected version unknown). It has been declared as critical. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown part of the component Digest Authentication Server-side. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a improper authentication vulnerability. The CWE definition for the vulnerability is CWE-287. When an actor claims to have a given identity, the product does not prove or insufficiently proves that the claim is correct. As an impact it is known to affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

In Eclipse Jetty, the Digest authentication server-side component uses ISO-8859-1 to encode the password as bytes. This was done because the initial specification for HTTP did not specify explicitly a charset, and it was assumed to be ISO-8859-1 for historical reasons. If the password contains characters that cannot be represented in ISO-8859-1, they are silently replaced by `?`. This happens with passwords that contain Chinese, Cyrillic or Greek characters, for example: `αβ123` converts to `??123`. An attacker can send a request with a digest `Authorization` header crafted with a password made of only `?` characters; the server would match any password of the same length that contains non-ISO-8859-1 characters. Recent HTTP Digest [RFC-7616](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7616) supports a `charset` parameters that defaults to UTF-8 that allows for correct encoding/decoding of passwords.

The advisory is shared at github.com. This vulnerability is known as CVE-2026-10050 since 05/29/2026. The exploitation appears to be easy. The attack can be launched remotely. The exploitation doesn't need any form of authentication. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 08/04/2026).

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Vendor

• Eclipse

Name

• Jetty

License

• free

CPE 2.3info

• 🔒

CPE 2.2info

• 🔒

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Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

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