Description
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.
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.
Analysis
No analysis available yet.
Default status is the baseline for the product, each version can override it (e.g. patched versions marked unaffected).
| Vendor | Product | Default status | Versions | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Eclipse Foundation | Eclipse Jetty - EE8 | unaffected |
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| Eclipse Foundation | Eclipse Jetty - EE9 | unaffected |
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| Eclipse Foundation | Eclipse Jetty | unaffected |
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Remediation
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Tracking
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Advisories
| Source | ID | Title |
|---|---|---|
 Github GHSA |
GHSA-2fvj-hgj9-j2gr | Eclipse Jetty Digest Authentication: ISO-8859-1 lossy encoding allows authentication bypass via character substitution |
References
History
Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:15:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| Description | 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. | |
| Title | Digest authentication lossy encoding | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-173 CWE-303 |
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| References |
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| Metrics |
cvssV4_0
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Subscriptions
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MITRE
Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: eclipse
Published:
Updated: 2026-08-04T11:02:40.503Z
Reserved: 2026-05-29T07:26:26.368Z
Link: CVE-2026-10050
Vulnrichment
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NVD
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Redhat
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OpenCVE Enrichment
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