What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-28498: Cryptographic Issues

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.3 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2021-02-02 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-327

Description

The package elliptic before 6.5.4 are vulnerable to Cryptographic Issues via the secp256k1 implementation in elliptic/ec/key.js. There is no check to confirm that the public key point passed into the derive function actually exists on the secp256k1 curve. This results in the potential for the private key used in this implementation to be revealed after a number of ECDH operations are performed.

Affected products

• Elliptic: before 6.5.4 — fixed in 6.5.4
• Npm Elliptic: before 6.5.4 — fixed in 6.5.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Elliptic 6.5.4; Npm Elliptic 6.5.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/christianlundkvist/blog/blob/master/2020_05_26_secp256k1_twist_attacks/secp256k1_twist_attacks.md
• https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/commit/441b7428b0e8f6636c42118ad2aaa186d3c34c3f
• https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-ORGWEBJARSNPM-1069836
• https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-ELLIPTIC-1064899
• https://github.com/christianlundkvist/blog/blob/master/2020_05_26_secp256k1_twist_attacks/secp256k1_twist_attacks.md
• https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/commit/441b7428b0e8f6636c42118ad2aaa186d3c34c3f
• https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-ORGWEBJARSNPM-1069836
• https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-ELLIPTIC-1064899

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