Overview
About vulnerability
The ECDSA implementation of the Elliptic package generates incorrect signatures if an interim value of ‘k’ (as computed based on step 3.2 of RFC 6979 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6979 ) has leading zeros and is susceptible to cryptanalysis, which can lead to secret key exposure. This happens, because the byte-length of ‘k’ is incorrectly computed, resulting in its getting truncated during the computation. Legitimate transactions or communications will be broken as a result. Furthermore, due to the nature of the fault, attackers could–under certain conditions–derive the secret key, if they could get their hands on both a faulty signature generated by a vulnerable version of Elliptic and a correct signature for the same inputs.
This issue affects all known versions of Elliptic (at the time of writing, versions less than or equal to 6.6.1).
Details
- Affected product:
- Acorn , Next.js , Node.js , browserify-sign , createecdh , cross-spawn , crypto-browserify , elliptic , semver , webpack
- Affected packages:
- cross-spawn @ 5.1.0 (+32 more)
The ECDSA implementation of the Elliptic package generates incorrect signatures if an interim value of ‘k’ (as computed based on step 3.2 of RFC 6979 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6979 ) has leading zeros and is susceptible to cryptanalysis, which can lead to secret key exposure. This happens, because the byte-length of ‘k’ is incorrectly computed, resulting in its getting truncated during the computation. Legitimate transactions or communications will be broken as a result. Furthermore, due to the nature of the fault, attackers could–under certain conditions–derive the secret key, if they could get their hands on both a faulty signature generated by a vulnerable version of Elliptic and a correct signature for the same inputs.
This issue affects all known versions of Elliptic (at the time of writing, versions less than or equal to 6.6.1).