CVE-2020-13822 — elliptic
HIGHCVE-2020-13822 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.7) CWE-190 vulnerability in elliptic. 1 public exploit reference exists, so weaponization risk is real. A fix is available for elliptic — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Signature Malleabillity in elliptic
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2020-13822 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 376,715 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
ellipticnpmDescription
The Elliptic package 6.5.2 for Node.js allows ECDSA signature malleability via variations in encoding, leading '\0' bytes, or integer overflows. This could conceivably have a security-relevant impact if an application relied on a single canonical signature.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | elliptic | all versions | 6.5.3npm install elliptic@6.5.3 |
Research use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for elliptic, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update elliptic to 6.5.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2020-13822 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2020-13822 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2020-13822. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
In both OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) and OpenShift ServiceMesh (OSSM), the grafana and prometheus containers don't use the vulnerable elliptic library for authentication (OpenShift OAuth is used) or traffic communications (OpenShift route is used). Therefore the impact for OCP and OSSM is Low. Red Hat Quay…
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.6 | openshift4/ose-grafana:v4.6.0-202010061132.p0 | RHSA-2020:4298 |
| Text-Only RHSSO | nodejs | RHSA-2020:5533 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2020-13822 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2020-13822 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.