VULNERABILITY INTELLIGENCE
CVE-2026-10050
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.
Weakness classification
- emo@eclipse.org: CWE-173
Primary references
- emo@eclipse.org — Vendor Advisory, Exploit
- emo@eclipse.org — Issue Tracking
- 134c704f-9b21-4f2e-91b3-4a467353bcc0 — Vendor Advisory, Exploit