Summary
CVE-2026-10050 is an authentication bypass in Eclipse Jetty’s Digest authentication implementation. Because passwords are encoded with ISO-8859-1, characters outside that charset are silently replaced with ?, allowing an attacker to authenticate with a substitute password that produces an identical Digest response hash. The issue is rated High severity (8.7).
Technical details
- Root cause: Jetty’s Digest authentication (
DigestAuthentication.apply()) computes MD5-based Digest response hashes using ISO-8859-1 encoding. Any character above U+00FF — including CJK, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, accented Latin characters, and emoji — is silently converted to the byte0x3F(?). - Trigger conditions: The account’s password must contain one or more non-ISO-8859-1 characters, and Digest authentication must be in use.
- Attack vector: Network. An attacker who knows the victim’s username can craft an authorization header substituting
?for each non-Latin-1 character; the resulting collision password hashes identically to the real one. - Impact: Authentication bypass with high confidentiality impact (CWE-173, CWE-303).
Affected software
org.eclipse.jetty:jetty-security: 9.4.0 through 9.4.58, 10.0.0 through 10.0.26, 11.0.0 through 11.0.26, 12.0.0 through 12.0.35, 12.1.0 through 12.1.9org.eclipse.jetty.ee8:jetty-ee8-security: 12.0.0 through 12.0.35, 12.1.0 through 12.1.9org.eclipse.jetty.ee9:jetty-ee9-security: 12.0.0 through 12.0.35, 12.1.0 through 12.1.9
Severity
CVSS 4.0 base score 8.7 (High) — CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N.
Mitigation and recommended actions
- Immediate: Upgrade to a patched release — 9.4.63, 10.0.31, 11.0.31, 12.0.36, or 12.1.10.
- If no patch: Avoid Digest authentication where non-ISO-8859-1 password characters are in use, or restrict passwords to the ISO-8859-1 character set; limit network exposure of Digest-protected endpoints.
How IONIX identifies potentially affected assets
IONIX matches the following signals against data already collected when it crawled the asset; identifying the technology sends no request beyond that crawl.
Serverresponse header:Jetty

