CVE-2022-31021: Unlinkability broken in ursa when verifiers use malicious keys

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2024-01-16 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-829

Description

Ursa is a cryptographic library for use with blockchains. A weakness in the Hyperledger AnonCreds specification that is not mitigated in the Ursa and AnonCreds implementations is that the Issuer does not publish a key correctness proof demonstrating that a generated private key is sufficient to meet the unlinkability guarantees of AnonCreds. The Ursa and AnonCreds CL-Signatures implementations always generate a sufficient private key. A malicious issuer could in theory create a custom CL Signature implementation (derived from the Ursa or AnonCreds CL-Signatures implementations) that uses weakened private keys such that presentations from holders could be shared by verifiers to the issuer who could determine the holder to which the credential was issued. This vulnerability could impact holders of AnonCreds credentials implemented using the CL-signature scheme in the Ursa and AnonCreds implementations of CL Signatures. The ursa project has has moved to end-of-life status and no fix is expected.

Affected products

hyperledger-archives ursa: before 0.3 — fixed in 0.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: hyperledger-archives ursa 0.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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