GHSA-w5vr-6qhr-36ccMediumCVSS 5.9

`ed25519-dalek` Double Public Key Signing Function Oracle Attack

Published
August 14, 2023
Last Modified
July 28, 2025

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 Description

Versions of ed25519-dalek prior to v2.0 model private and public keys as separate types which can be assembled into a Keypair, and also provide APIs for serializing and deserializing 64-byte private/public keypairs.

Such APIs and serializations are inherently unsafe as the public key is one of the inputs used in the deterministic computation of the S part of the signature, but not in the R value. An adversary could somehow use the signing function as an oracle that allows arbitrary public keys as input can obtain two signatures for the same message sharing the same R and only differ on the S part.

Unfortunately, when this happens, one can easily extract the private key.

Revised public APIs in v2.0 of ed25519-dalek do NOT allow a decoupled private/public keypair as signing input, except as part of specially labeled "hazmat" APIs which are clearly labeled as being dangerous if misused.

🎯 Affected products1

  • rust/ed25519-dalek:< 2.0.0

🔗 References (4)