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.
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History
Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:15:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | |
| Title | Digest authentication lossy encoding | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-173 CWE-303 |
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cvssV4_0
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Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: eclipse
Published:
Updated: 2026-08-04T11:02:40.503Z
Reserved: 2026-05-29T07:26:26.368Z
Link: CVE-2026-10050
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OpenCVE Enrichment
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