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Fencer Intel
medium 5.8

CVE-2009-5138 json

GnuTLS before 2.7.6, when the GNUTLS_VERIFY_ALLOW_X509_V1_CA_CRT flag is not enabled, treats version 1 X.509 certificates as intermediate C…

published 12y ago modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2009-5093

cvss
5.8
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.8%
EPSS 1.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 78%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

GnuTLS before 2.7.6, when the GNUTLS_VERIFY_ALLOW_X509_V1_CA_CRT flag is not enabled, treats version 1 X.509 certificates as intermediate CAs, which allows remote attackers to bypass intended restrictions by leveraging a X.509 V1 certificate from a trusted CA to issue new certificates, a different vulnerability than CVE-2014-1959.

Patch / fix

  • gnutls RHEL 5 1.4.1-14.el5_10
  • gnutls-utils RHEL 5 1.4.1-14.el5_10

red hat advisories RHSA-2014:0247

Is CVE-2009-5138 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2009-5138 updated cvss 5.8

gnutls: incorrect handling of V1 intermediate certificates

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 mingw32-gnutls
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server) gnutls 1.4.1-14.el5_10, gnutls-utils 1.4.1-14.el5_10 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client) gnutls 1.4.1-14.el5_10, gnutls-utils 1.4.1-14.el5_10 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop Workstation (v. 5 client) gnutls 1.4.1-14.el5_10
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2014:0247
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 gnutls, gnutls-guile, gnutls-utils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 gnutls, gnutls-c++, gnutls-dane, gnutls-utils
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.80% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 78% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • gitorious.org https://gitorious.org/gnutls/gnutls/commit/c8dcbedd1fdc312f5b1a70fcfbc1afe235d800cd referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 5.8 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:N

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-264 Permissions, Privileges, and Access Controls

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.