In short
- CVE-2025-27144 is a MEDIUM (CVSS 6.6) vulnerability affecting github.com/go-jose/go-jose, github.com/go-jose/go-jose/v3, github.com/go-jose/go-jose/v4.
- Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days (EPSS): 0.40%, higher than 34.3% of all vulnerabilities.
- Fix: update to 3.0.4, 4.0.5 or later.
Description
Impact
When parsing compact JWS or JWE input, go-jose could use excessive memory. The code used strings.Split(token, ".") to split JWT tokens, which is vulnerable to excessive memory consumption when processing maliciously crafted tokens with a large number of '.' characters. An attacker could exploit this by sending numerous malformed tokens, leading to memory exhaustion and a Denial of Service.
Patches
Version 4.0.5 fixes this issue
Workarounds
Applications could pre-validate payloads passed to go-jose do not contain an excessive number of '.' characters.
References
This is the same sort of issue as in the golang.org/x/oauth2/jws package as CVE-2025-22868 and Go issue https://go.dev/issue/71490.
NVD description
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. In versions on the 4.x branch prior to version 4.0.5, when parsing compact JWS or JWE input, Go JOSE could use excessive memory. The code used strings.Split(token, ".") to split JWT tokens, which is vulnerable to excessive memory consumption when processing maliciously crafted tokens with a large number of `.` characters. An attacker could exploit this by sending numerous malformed tokens, leading to memory exhaustion and a Denial of Service. Version 4.0.5 fixes this issue. As a workaround, applications could pre-validate that payloads passed to Go JOSE do not contain an excessive number of `.` characters.
More vulnerabilities in github.com/go-jose/go-jose
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