CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-48525 — PyJWT is a JSON Web Token implementation in Python

Medium CVSS 5.3

PyJWT is a JSON Web Token implementation in Python. From 2.8.0 to 2.12.1, when verifying detached JWS tokens using the unencoded-payload option ("b64": false, RFC 7797), PyJWT performs Base64URL decoding of the compact-serialization payload segment before enforcing the detached-payload rules. For b64=false, PyJWT later discards that decoded payload and replaces it with the caller-provided detached_payload. In practice, this turns the middle segment into an attacker-controlled “work amplifier”: a remote client can supply an arbitrarily large Base64URL payload segment that forces CPU work + memory allocations even if the signature is invalid. This creates an unauthenticated DoS vector against any endpoint that verifies detached JWS using PyJWT. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.13.0.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2026-05-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
python/pypi
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • pyjwt_project / pyjwt

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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