5.9

CVSS Score

3.1

-

CVSS Score

Basic Information

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CVE-2025-59154

CVE-2025-59154: Openfire has potential identity spoofing issue via unsafe CN parsing

Summary

Identity spoofing in X.509 client certificate authentication in Openfire allows internal attackers to impersonate other users via crafted certificate subject attributes, due to regex-based extraction of CN from an unescaped, provider-dependent DN string.

Analysis

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.

Impact

When there is no explicit configuration override, Openfire defaults to using certificate attributes as follows:

Server-to-server certificates: first the Subject Alternative Name (SAN), and if that is not available, the Common Name (CN).
Client-to-server certificates: only the Common Name (CN).

Use of CN for identity mapping was phased out by the CA/Browser Forum. CAB Forum-compliant CAs no longer allow arbitrary Subject RDNs and always include SANs. As a result, certificates issued by public CAs for use on the open Internet are unlikely to be exploitable, though older certificates still within their validity period could theoretically be abused.

The primary risks exist in private CA environments and client certificate authentication, where identity mapping may rely solely on the CN. Both of these are niche deployment scenarios.

Patches

The path has been prepared by replacing the use of getSubjectDN().getName() with standards-compliant parsing of the RFC2253 representation of . This avoids unescaped provider-dependent strings and prevents regex from matching malicious substrings.

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CVE-2025-59154

CVE-2025-59154:

5.9

CVSS Score

3.1

-

CVSS Score

Basic Information

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Technical Details

Package Name	Ecosystem	Vulnerable Versions	First Patched Version
org.igniterealtime.openfire:xmppserver	maven	< 5.0.2	5.0.2

Technical Details

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Root Cause Analysis

The vulnerability analysis began by understanding the description, which pointed to an identity spoofing issue due to unsafe parsing of the Common Name (CN) from X.509 certificates in Openfire. The advisory mentioned that the fix was included in version 5.0.2 and provided a link to the affected code, although the commit hash in the URL was not the patch itself. To find the exact patch, I compared the git tags for version v5.0.1 and v5.0.2 of the igniterealtime/Openfire repository. This comparison revealed a series of commits, including commit 182b04337864571e026b393978526cc54724536d, which had the message "OF-3124: Guard against identity spoofing via unsafe CN parsing." This commit directly addresses the vulnerability.

Analysis of this commit's diff showed changes in xmppserver/src/main/java/org/jivesoftware/util/cert/CNCertificateIdentityMapping.java. Specifically, the mapIdentity method was completely rewritten. The vulnerable version of the function used certificate.getSubjectDN().getName() and a regular expression to extract the CN. This is the root cause of the vulnerability, as it performs parsing on an unescaped, provider-dependent string. The patched version replaces this logic with a much safer approach using certificate.getSubjectX500Principal() and javax.naming.ldap.LdapName to parse the DN according to RFC2253 standards. This ensures that attributes are correctly parsed and prevents the injection of fake CN values within other attributes. Therefore, the org.jivesoftware.util.cert.CNCertificateIdentityMapping.mapIdentity function is the precise location of the vulnerability.

Vulnerable functions

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WAF Protection Rules

WAF Rule

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Reasoning

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5.9

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Basic Information

Basic Information

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CVE-2025-59154: Openfire has potential identity spoofing issue via unsafe CN parsing

Summary

Analysis

Impact

Patches

CVE-2025-59154:

5.9

-

Basic Information

Basic Information

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Technical Details

Technical Details

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Root Cause Analysis

Vulnerable functions

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WAF Protection Rules

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Reasoning

Basic Information

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Technical Details

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Root Cause Analysis

Vulnerable functions

5.9

5.9

CVE-2025-59154: Openfire has potential identity spoofing issue via unsafe CN parsing

Summary

Analysis

Impact

Patches

Workarounds

Full workaround (drop-in replacement JAR using the fixed mapper)

Other, lesser workarounds

Use SAN-only mapping

Disable certificate-based authentication:

References

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