CVE-2016-10932 in Hyper Crate
Summary
by MITRE
An issue was discovered in the hyper crate before 0.9.4 for Rust on Windows. There is an HTTPS man-in-the-middle vulnerability because hostname verification was omitted.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 12/04/2023
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2016-10932 affects the hyper crate version 0.9.3 and earlier in Rust programming language environments specifically on Windows operating systems. This represents a critical security flaw that undermines the integrity of secure communications by failing to properly validate SSL/TLS certificate hostnames during HTTPS connections. The hyper crate serves as a foundational HTTP client and server implementation for Rust applications, making this vulnerability particularly concerning for software systems that rely on secure web communications.
The technical root cause of this vulnerability stems from the complete omission of hostname verification during the SSL/TLS handshake process within the hyper crate's implementation. When establishing HTTPS connections, proper hostname verification ensures that the certificate presented by the server matches the domain name being accessed, thereby preventing attackers from intercepting communications through certificate substitution attacks. Without this verification step, malicious actors can perform man-in-the-middle attacks by presenting valid certificates for different domains, allowing them to decrypt and potentially modify traffic between clients and servers. This flaw specifically impacts Windows environments where the underlying SSL libraries may not provide adequate default security measures.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe and far-reaching for any Rust application utilizing the hyper crate for HTTPS communications on Windows systems. Attackers can exploit this weakness to intercept sensitive data, modify communications, inject malicious content, or perform session hijacking attacks against vulnerable applications. The vulnerability affects not only web clients but also any service that relies on hyper for making secure HTTP requests to external APIs or web services. Given that hyper is widely used in Rust web frameworks and microservices architectures, the potential attack surface extends across numerous applications and systems that may be unknowingly exposed to this threat.
This vulnerability aligns with CWE-295, which specifically addresses improper certificate validation, and maps to ATT&CK technique T1041 for data manipulation through man-in-the-middle attacks. Organizations should immediately upgrade to hyper version 0.9.4 or later where hostname verification has been properly implemented. Additional mitigations include implementing network-level security controls such as certificate pinning for critical applications, deploying intrusion detection systems to monitor for suspicious SSL/TLS behavior, and conducting comprehensive security assessments of all Rust applications using the hyper crate. System administrators should also consider implementing certificate transparency monitoring and regularly reviewing SSL/TLS configurations to ensure proper hostname validation is enforced across all network communications.