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.
Metrics
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:HWeakness enumeration
Affected software
No affected versions have been published.
Timeline
- Published
- Aug 4, 2026
- Last modified
- Aug 8, 2026
- NVD status
- Analyzed