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Fencer Intel
medium —

GHSA-f5v5-ccqc-6w36 json

async-nats vulnerable to TLS certificate common name validation bypass

published 3y ago modified 3y ago also RUSTSEC-2023-0027

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
—
no score, EPSS covers CVEs only
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The NATS official Rust clients are vulnerable to MitM when using TLS.

The common name of the server's TLS certificate is validated against the `host`name provided by the server's plaintext `INFO` message during the initial connection setup phase. A MitM proxy can tamper with the `host` field's value by substituting it with the common name of a valid certificate it controls, fooling the client into accepting it.

## Reproduction steps

1. The NATS Rust client tries to establish a new connection 2. The connection is intercepted by a MitM proxy 3. The proxy makes a separate connection to the NATS server 4. The NATS server replies with an `INFO` message 5. The proxy reads the `INFO`, alters the `host` JSON field and passes the tampered `INFO` back to the client 6. The proxy upgrades the client connection to TLS, presenting a certificate issued by a certificate authority present in the client's keychain. In the previous step the `host` was set to the common name of said certificate 7. `rustls` accepts the certificate, having verified that the common name matches the attacker-controlled value it was given 8. The client has been fooled by the MitM proxy into accepting the attacker-controlled certificate

Patch / fix

  • crates.io async-nats 0.29.0

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Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
crates.io async-nats
<0.29.0
>=0.0.0-0, <0.29.0
0.29.0

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.