PyJWT: Asymmetric-PEM detection bypass: whitespace/line-ending-mutated public keys skip the HS/asymmetric confusion guard
At a glance
Severity
CRITICAL 9.1
EPSS
EPSS 0.24 % · percentile 14 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
GitHub_M
NVD status
Analyzed
Description
PyJWT is a Python implementation of JSON Web Token standards. Prior to 2.14.0, is_pem_format in jwt/utils.py is affected because is_pem_format does not recognize every PEM representation accepted by the cryptography loader. This occurs when an application mixes HMAC and asymmetric algorithms and supplies a mutated public-key PEM as raw key bytes. As a result, HMACAlgorithm.prepare_key treats the unrecognized asymmetric public key as an HMAC secret. Consequently, an attacker who knows the public key can forge authenticated HMAC tokens. This issue is fixed in version 2.14.0.