NetSight
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critical9.1

CVE-2026-10050

Eclipse Jetty Digest Authentication: ISO-8859-1 lossy encoding allows authentication bypass via character substitution

Impact

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.

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
mavenorg.eclipse.jetty:jetty-security>= 9.4.0.v20161208, <= 9.4.58.v202508149.4.63
mavenorg.eclipse.jetty.ee8:jetty-ee8-security>= 12.0.0, <= 12.0.3512.0.36
mavenorg.eclipse.jetty.ee9:jetty-ee9-security>= 12.0.0, <= 12.0.3512.0.36

Affected products

VendorProductAffected versions
EclipseJetty
from 9.4.0 before 9.4.63
from 10.0.0 before 10.0.31
from 11.0.0 before 11.0.31
from 12.0.0 before 12.0.36
from 12.1.0 before 12.1.10

Weakness classification

CWE-173CWE-303

References