CryptoApplication · Golang
CVE-2019-11841
Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.
NVD · uneditedA message-forgery issue was discovered in crypto/openpgp/clearsign/clearsign.go in supplementary Go cryptography libraries 2019-03-25. According to the OpenPGP Message Format specification in RFC 4880 chapter 7, a cleartext signed message can contain one or more optional "Hash" Armor Headers. The "Hash" Armor Header specifies the message digest algorithm(s) used for the signature. However, the Go clearsign package ignores the value of this header, which allows an attacker to spoof it. Consequently, an attacker can lead a victim to believe the signature was generated using a different message digest algorithm than what was actually used. Moreover, since the library skips Armor Header parsing in general, an attacker can not only embed arbitrary Armor Headers, but also prepend arbitrary text to cleartext messages without invalidating the signatures.
Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.
dbcve analysisThe application accepts signed data without properly verifying the signature, so an attacker can forge or tamper with content that the system is meant to trust — tokens, updates, licences. Everything built on that trust then becomes unreliable. Remediation is verifying every signature against the correct key and rejecting anything that does not validate.
General guidance for the improper signature verification class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →
Affected products & versions What the vendor confirmedThe version ranges the vendor confirmed as vulnerable. If your version sits inside a range here, treat yourself as exposed until you have upgraded.
NVD · CPE data
CryptoApplication
= 2019-03-25
Debian LinuxOperating system
= 8.0= 9.0CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.
From the vector- Attack vector
- Network
- Complexity
- High
- Privileges
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Scope
- Unchanged
- Confidentiality
- None
- Integrity
- High
- Availability
- None
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.
From vendor data
No vendor fix exists
Crypto has not published a patch for this.
There is no version to upgrade to and no patch to apply. Every affected install stays exposed until the vendor ships a fix — or somebody else builds one.
Free. We build fixes in the order the community asks for them — and we’ll tell you the moment this one lands.
We develop and verify an original fix where the vendor hasn’t, from $1,600. Deployed to your staging first — never straight to production.
Scope it with usSee what else the community needs solved on the solutions-needed board.
Scan for this in your stack
Free · runs locallyCheck whether your project pulls in CVE-2019-11841 — or any other known-vulnerable package — straight from your lock files. Free and open source; it runs locally and uploads nothing.
References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.
Primary sourcesPractitioner notes
ContributedPeer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2019-11841 in production — separate from our analysis above.
The advisory tells you what broke. It rarely tells you what actually worked. If you’ve dealt with this one, that detail is what the next engineer is searching for.
- The version that genuinely resolved it — not the one the vendor claimed
- A config change or rule that shut the vector down
- A gotcha in the upgrade path that cost you an afternoon
No notes yet
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- Verified mitigations, workarounds, and config changes
- Version or environment caveats, and links to real fixes
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