Openfire < 5.0.2 / 5.1.0 Identity Spoofing

medium Nessus Plugin ID 265328

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Synopsis

The remote host contains an application that is affected by an identity spoofing vulnerability.

Description

The remote host is running a version of Openfire that is affected by an identity spoofing vulnerability. 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.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Upgrade to version 5.0.2, 5.1.0 or later.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 265328

File Name: openfire_5_1_0.nasl

Version: 1.2

Type: remote

Family: CGI abuses

Published: 9/17/2025

Updated: 9/19/2025

Supported Sensors: Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.0

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.3

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:M/C:C/I:C/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2025-59154

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.9

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/a:igniterealtime:openfire

Required KB Items: installed_sw/Openfire Console

Patch Publication Date: 9/15/2025

Vulnerability Publication Date: 9/15/2025

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2025-59154

CWE: 290

IAVB: 2025-B-0153

Detections

Analytics