NIP-98 authorization parsing permits resource exhaustion

Overview

The NIP-98 HTTP authorization parser Base64-decoded the complete authorization value and parsed the resulting JSON event without applying an application-level size limit. Both operations occurred before the event's signature and authorization fields could be validated.

An unauthenticated remote client could send an oversized Authorization: Nostr header to a server using this parser. Each request caused memory allocation and decoding and JSON parsing work proportional to the supplied value, allowing repeated requests to consume server memory and CPU. The impact depends on any lower HTTP header limit already enforced by the hosting server. The issue does not bypass NIP-98 authentication or disclose protected data.

The parser now rejects oversized encoded input before Base64 allocation and rejects decoded authorization events larger than 64 KiB before JSON parsing.

Affected packages

• nostr >= 0.0.0-0, < 0.44.7

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

• nostr 0.44.7