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

Summary

The DigestAuthentication.apply() method in Jetty's HTTP client uses getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1) 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:

 1// Line 171 — H(A1)
 2String hashA1 = toHexString(digester.digest(a1.getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1)));
 3 
 4// Line 179 — H(A2)
 5String hashA2 = toHexString(digester.digest(a2.getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1)));
 6 
 7// Line 196 — Final response hash
 8final String hashA3 = toHexString(digester.digest(a3.getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1)));

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(ISO_8859_1) in Java performs this replacement without any warning or exception.

PoC

 1Password: "我爱Java!密码123★" (7 non-Latin-1 characters)
 2 
 3UTF-8 encoding:    45 bytes → MD5 H(A1) = 9a4e61484f228633d5d0f95d1bbb0a99
 4ISO-8859-1:        31 bytes → MD5 H(A1) = d60ddc903d71913bcc3ab4a94f7fc239
 5Collision "??...": 31 bytes → MD5 H(A1) = d60ddc903d71913bcc3ab4a94f7fc239 ← IDENTICAL

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

 1Chinese (密码123)  → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560
 2Korean  (비번123)  → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560
 3Cyrillic(аб123)    → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560
 4Greek   (αβ123)    → H(A1) = db87f31e8d96cd15f9acec7eabdc4560
 5Attacker(??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.