Summary
When allowed_origins is configured, CheckAllowedOrigins reduces URL-like values to their host component and accepts on host match alone. This makes exact origin policies impossible to express: scheme and port differences are silently ignored.
Details
CheckAllowedOrigins stores each configured allowed origin as:
parse_url($allowedOrigin)['host'] ?? $allowedOrigin
and later reduces the received clientDataJSON.origin the same way:
parse_url($C->origin)['host'] ?? $C->origin
If the reduced value matches, the method returns early. As a result, for the normal allowed_origins path, the later HTTPS check is not reached.
This differs from WebAuthn Level 2, which requires verifying that C.origin matches the RP's origin (scheme + host + port), separately from verifying that authData.rpIdHash matches the expected RP ID.
Affected code:
Spec references:
PoC
Configuration:
webauthn:
allowed_origins:
- https://login.example.com:8443
allow_subdomains: false
Send a registration or authentication response whose clientDataJSON.origin is:
https://login.example.com:9443
Observed: the response is accepted, because both values are reduced to login.example.com.
Expected: the response should be rejected, because https://login.example.com:8443 and https://login.example.com:9443 are different origins.
Impact
This is an origin validation error (CWE-346) affecting deployments that use allowed_origins. The most practical browser-facing scenario is same-host / different-port origin confusion. In non-browser or custom clients, scheme confusion may also be relevant.
Fix
Fixed in version 5.2.4 by rewriting CheckAllowedOrigins to perform full origin comparison (scheme + host + port) as required by the WebAuthn spec:
- Origins configured with a scheme (e.g.
https://example.com:8443) are now stored and compared as full scheme://host[:port] values, with default port normalization (443 for HTTPS, 80 for HTTP).
- Origins configured without a scheme are still matched by host only, for backward compatibility.
- Subdomain matching now also verifies scheme and port consistency.
See commit b4cd9a43.
Mitigation
Upgrade to web-auth/webauthn-framework (or web-auth/webauthn-lib / web-auth/webauthn-symfony-bundle) >= 5.2.4.