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Vulnerability · Published Sep 15, 2025 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2025-59154Openfire allows potential identity spoofing via unsafe CN parsing

Medium 5.9

In plain English

A medium-severity authentication bypass by spoofing in Openfire from igniterealtime. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 14% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS 3.1)5.9Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.2%top 85.6% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

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.

Affected packages & fixed versions

EcosystemPackageFixed inAdvisory
Mavenorg.igniterealtime.openfire:xmppserver5.0.2GHSA-w252-645g-87mp

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
igniterealtime Openfire < 5.0.2

Weakness: CWE-290 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

References