CVE-2026-55735

Summary

Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature in ueberauth guardian allows an unauthenticated attacker to revoke a victim's session with a forged token.

Guardian.revoke/3 in lib/guardian.ex decodes the supplied token with peek/1, which performs no signature verification (it only base64-decodes the JWT header and payload). The resulting unverified claims are forwarded directly to the configured token module's revoke callback and the implementation's on_revoke callback, a state-mutating sink. The sibling operations refresh/2 and exchange/4 both call decode_and_verify first, so the signature is checked before anything acts on the claims; revoke/3 is the only state-mutating path that acts on claims without verifying the signature.

An attacker who knows or guesses a victim's identifying claim values (jti, sub) can forge a JWT carrying those claims, sign it with an arbitrary key, and submit it to any endpoint that funnels a caller-supplied token into Guardian.revoke/3 (the standard logout / session-revocation pattern). When the token module mutates state keyed by the claims (whitelist deletion or blacklist insertion, for example a GuardianDb-style store), the victim's legitimate session is evicted. This is an unauthenticated session-revocation denial of service; the attacker never needs the signing secret.

This issue affects guardian: from 1.0.0 before 2.4.1.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
ueberauthguardian1.0.0 < 2.4.1affected
ueberauthguardiand65227145f72b290106c06cecbe42728fbf05fe2 < 2bd7a8c29770d423d855c0a4965caa6c3e486901affected

Weaknesses

  • CWE-347: CWE-347 Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature

Workarounds

Verify the token before revoking it: call decode_and_verify (or a verify-without-expiry variant, so already-expired tokens remain revocable) on the caller-supplied token and pass only tokens whose signature validates into Guardian.revoke/3. Reject tokens with an invalid signature at the application boundary.

References