The 2017 Pwnie Nominee For Best Cryptographic Attack

Critical vulnerability in JSON Web Encryption

Credit: Antonio Sanso and Quan Nguyen

RFC 7516 aka JSON Web Encryption (JWE) hence many software libraries implementing this specification used to suffer from a classic Invalid Curve Attack. This would allow an attacker to completely recover the secret key of a party using JWE with Key Agreement with Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral Static (ECDH-ES), where the sender could extract receiver’s private key.

Critical vulnerability in JSON Web Encryption (JWE) – RFC 7516