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.
Affected products
eclipse: jetty
References3
- github.com/jetty/jetty.project/security/advisories/GHSA-2fvj-hg… Vendor AdvisoryExploit
- github.com/jetty/jetty.project/security/advisories/GHSA-2fvj-hg… Vendor AdvisoryExploit
- gitlab.eclipse.org/security/cve-assignment/-/work_items/120 Issue Tracking
Metrics
- CVSS 3.1
-
9.1
CRITICAL
Score source: NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H - CVSS 4.0
-
8.7
HIGH
Score source: CNA
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X - EPSS — exploit probability
- 1% percentile: 51 · as of 13 November 2026
- CWE
- CWE-173CWE-303
Could this be exploited in your environment?
A patch closes the known hole. A penetration test shows what an attacker can still reach — with proof.