igniterealtime Openfire up to 5.0.1 X509Certificate.getSubjectDN.getName authentication spoofing

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability categorized as critical has been discovered in igniterealtime Openfire up to 5.0.1. This affects the function X509Certificate.getSubjectDN.getName. The manipulation results in authentication spoofing. This vulnerability is known as CVE-2025-59154. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. No exploit is available. It is advisable to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in igniterealtime Openfire up to 5.0.1. It has been classified as problematic. Affected is the function X509Certificate.getSubjectDN.getName. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a authentication spoofing vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-290. This attack-focused weakness is caused by incorrectly implemented authentication schemes that are subject to spoofing attacks. This is going to have an impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

Openfire is an XMPP server licensed under the Open Source Apache License. Openfire’s SASL EXTERNAL mechanism for client TLS authentication contains a vulnerability in how it extracts user identities from X.509 certificates. Instead of parsing the structured ASN.1 data, the code calls X509Certificate.getSubjectDN().getName() and applies a regex to look for CN=. This method produces a provider-dependent string that does not escape special characters. In SunJSSE (sun.security.x509.X500Name), for example, commas and equals signs inside attribute values are not escaped. As a result, a malicious certificate can embed CN= inside another attribute value (e.g. OU="CN=admin,"). The regex will incorrectly interpret this as a legitimate Common Name and extract admin. If SASL EXTERNAL is enabled and configured to map CNs to user accounts, this allows the attacker to impersonate another user. The fix is included in Openfire 5.0.2 and 5.1.0.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2025-59154 since 09/09/2025. The exploitability is told to be difficult. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. The exploitation requires an enhanced level of successful authentication. Technical details are known, but there is no available exploit.

Upgrading to version 5.0.2 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Vendor

• igniterealtime

Name

• Openfire

Version

• 5.0.0
• 5.0.1

Website

• Product: https://github.com/igniterealtime/Openfire/

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