CVE-2026-10050: Digest authentication lossy encoding

Summary The DigestAuthentication.apply() method in Jetty's HTTP client uses getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO88591) at three locations (lines 171, 179, 196) to compute Digest auth response hashes. ISO-8859-1 silently replaces any character above U+00FF (Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, Arabic, Emoji, etc.) with 0x3F (?), causing all such characters to produce identical hash contributions. An attacker who knows a victim's username can bypass Digest authentication by replacing all non-Latin-1 characters in the password with ? characters, since the collision password produces the same MD5-based Digest response hash as the original password.

Details Root Cause

In jetty-core/jetty-client/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/client/DigestAuthentication.java, the apply() method computes the three Digest auth hashes (H(A1), H(A2), and the final response) using ISO-8859-1 character encoding:

java // Line 171 — H(A1) String hashA1 = toHexString(digester.digest(a1.getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO88591)));

// Line 179 — H(A2) String hashA2 = toHexString(digester.digest(a2.getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO88591)));

// Line 196 — Final response hash final String hashA3 = toHexString(digester.digest(a3.getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO88591)));

ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) can only encode characters in the range U+0000–U+00FF. Any character outside this range — including all CJK, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hangul, and emoji characters — is silently replaced with the byte 0x3F (?). String.getBytes(ISO88591) in Java performs this replacement without any warning or exception.

PoC Password: "我爱Java!密码123★" (7 non-Latin-1 characters)

UTF-8 encoding: 45 bytes → MD5 H(A1) = 9a4e61484f228633d5d0f95d1bbb0a99 ISO-8859-1: 31 bytes → MD5 H(A1) = d60ddc903d71913bcc3ab4a94f7fc239 Collision "??...": 31 bytes → MD5 H(A1) = d60ddc903d71913bcc3ab4a94f7fc239 ← IDENTICAL

Multi-language confirmation — all four language passwords below produce the same hash:

Chinese (密码123) → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560 Korean (비번123) → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560 Cyrillic(аб123) → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560 Greek (αβ123) → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560 Attacker(??123) → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560 ← all collide!

Impact Scenario 1: Authentication Bypass (Collision Attack)

If a service using Jetty for Digest authentication has a user with a non-Latin-1 password (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Russian), an attacker can authenticate as that user using a collision password where all non-Latin-1 characters are replaced with ?:

- Original password: 我爱Java!密码123★ - Collision password: ??Java!??123? - Both produce identical MD5 hashes under ISO-8859-1 → Authentication succeeds

This affects any password containing characters > U+00FF, which covers: - Chinese (CJK): U+4E00–U+9FFF - Japanese (Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji): U+3040–U+30FF, U+4E00+ - Korean (Hangul): U+AC00–U+D7AF - Cyrillic: U+0400–U+04FF (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, etc.) - Arabic: U+0600–U+06FF - Greek: U+0370–U+03FF - Latin Extended: U+0100–U+024F (accented European characters like ĉ, ğ, ñ when > U+00FF) - Emoji / Symbols > U+00FF

Scenario 2: Denial of Service for Non-Latin-1 Users

Most modern web applications store password hashes computed using UTF-8. When Jetty's Digest client computes a hash with ISO-8859-1, the bytes differ from what the server stored/expects. This means any user with non-ASCII (Latin-1+) characters in their password can never successfully authenticate via Digest auth — even the legitimate user. This is not just a security issue but a functional correctness bug that silently breaks authentication for most non-European-language users.