Eclipse Arrowhead up to 5.2.1 MQTT API CertificateFactory.generateCertificate Authentication certificate validation

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in Eclipse Arrowhead up to 5.2.1. It has been declared as problematic. This impacts the function CertificateFactory.generateCertificate of the component MQTT API. The manipulation of the argument Authentication results in certificate validation. This vulnerability was named CVE-2026-82180. The attack may be performed from remote. There is no available exploit.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Eclipse Arrowhead up to 5.2.1. It has been classified as problematic. Affected is the function CertificateFactory.generateCertificate of the component MQTT API. The manipulation of the argument authentication with an unknown input leads to a certificate validation vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-295. The product does not validate, or incorrectly validates, a certificate. This is going to have an impact on integrity. CVE summarizes:

In Eclipse Arrowhead versions from 5.0.0 to 5.2.1 when the MQTT API is enabled with the certificate authentication policy, CertificateMqttFilter parses an X.509 certificate that the client sends inside the MQTT message payload (the authentication field of MqttRequestTemplate) and treats its Subject DN as the authenticated identity. The certificate is decoded with CertificateFactory.generateCertificate() but its signature is never verified and its issuer chain is never validated against any trust store. Authorisation is reduced to two string comparisons on attacker-supplied data: the DN-qualifier must equal "sy" or "op", and the cloud-name part of the CN must match the server's. Both values are public (the cloud name is in the server's own TLS certificate). An attacker who can publish to the MQTT broker can therefore mint a self-signed certificate with CN=Sysop.<cloud>.<org>.arrowhead.eu, dnQualifier=op, send it as the authentication field, and be authenticated as the cloud's system operator with isSysOp == true. This passes the downstream ManagementServiceMqttFilter (request.isSysOp() → allowed) and gives full management access over MQTT. The HTTP CertificateFilter is not affected — it reads the certificate from jakarta.servlet.request.X509Certificate, which Tomcat populates only after a successful mTLS handshake against the configured trust store.

The advisory is available at gitlab.eclipse.org. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-82180 since 08/28/2026. The exploitability is told to be difficult. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. The exploitation doesn't require any form of authentication. Technical details are known, but there is no available exploit. The structure of the vulnerability defines a possible price range of USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 09/03/2026). This vulnerability is assigned to T1587.003 by the MITRE ATT&CK project.

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

Productinfo

Vendor

• Eclipse

Name

• Arrowhead

Version

• 5.2.0
• 5.2.1

License

• open-source

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CPE 2.2info

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