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Fencer Intel
medium 5.9

CVE-2025-59154 json

Openfire allows potential identity spoofing via unsafe CN parsing

published last yr. modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2025-29235 , GHSA-w252-645g-87mp

cvss
5.9
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 14%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Openfire is an XMPP server licensed under the Open Source Apache License. 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. The fix is included in Openfire 5.0.2 and 5.1.0.

Patch / fix

  • maven org.igniterealtime.openfire:xmppserver 5.0.2
  • igniterealtime openfire 5.0.2
  • org.igniterealtime.openfire xmppserver 5.0.2

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CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
last yr.

Exploit prediction

0.23% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 14% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 5.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
GitHub 3.1 5.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
maven org.igniterealtime.openfire:xmppserver
<5.0.2
5.0.2

Affected products

  • igniterealtime Openfire

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-290 Authentication Bypass by Spoofing

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.

CPEs and fixed versions use Anchore's correction of NVD's data: Added CPE configurations because not yet analyzed by NVD.