Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

parsing RSA keys is wrong

Open
#893 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, node.js

Research direction

Start at the jwt.verify(token, secretOrPublicKey, ...) entry point and reproduce the issue with the public and private RSA keys described in the report. Trace how each key is classified; done means public keys are identified as public and private keys as private, with regression coverage for both cases.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

when passing an RSA key to jwt.verify(token, secretOrPublicKey, {algoriths: ['RS256'] }), it is being parsed wrongly.

when passing a public key it is parsed as { type: "secret" }, and when passing a private key it is parsed as { type: "public" }

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
18.2k
Forks
1.3k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from auth0/node-jsonwebtoken

All issues in auth0/node-jsonwebtoken

Similar issues

More JavaScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.