GHSA-x9w5-v3q2-3rhw is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-347 vulnerability in browserify-sign. A fix is available for browserify-sign — see the affected versions and patch details below.
browserify-sign upper bound check issue in `dsaVerify` leads to a signature forgery attack
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
GHSA-x9w5-v3q2-3rhw 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 379,145 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.
browserify-signnpmDescription
Summary
An upper bound check issue in dsaVerify function allows an attacker to construct signatures that can be successfully verified by any public key, thus leading to a signature forgery attack.
Details
In dsaVerify function, it checks whether the value of the signature is legal by calling function checkValue, namely, whether r and s are both in the interval [1, q - 1]. However, the second line of the checkValue function wrongly checks the upper bound of the passed parameters, since the value of b.cmp(q) can only be 0, 1 and -1, and it can never be greater than q.
In this way, although the values of s cannot be 0, an attacker can achieve the same effect as zero by setting its value to q, and then send (r, s) = (1, q) to pass the verification of any public key.
Impact
All places in this project that involve DSA verification of user-input signatures will be affected by this vulnerability.
Fix PR:
Since the temporary private fork was deleted, here's a webarchive of the PR discussion and diff pages: PR webarchive.zip
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | browserify-sign | ≥ 2.6.0&&< 4.2.2 | 4.2.2npm install browserify-sign@4.2.2 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for browserify-sign, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update browserify-sign to 4.2.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-x9w5-v3q2-3rhw 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 GHSA-x9w5-v3q2-3rhw can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-x9w5-v3q2-3rhw. 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.
An attacker could impact the integrity of a server when handling unknown input due to the lack of DSA verification, for example, pretending to be a legitimate user, gaining unauthorized access. Therefore, the impact for this vulnerability is important. Red Hat Fuse 7 uses browserify-sign as a transitive development…
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Developer Hub 1.2 on RHEL 9 | rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1.2-154 | RHBA-2024:10184 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-x9w5-v3q2-3rhw in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-x9w5-v3q2-3rhw across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.