CWE-296: Improper Following of a Certificate's Chain of Trust

BaseLikelihood of exploit: Low

The product does not follow, or incorrectly follows, the chain of trust for a certificate back to a trusted root certificate.

There are several ways in which the chain of trust might be broken, including but not limited to: Any certificate in the chain is self-signed, unless it is the root. Not every intermediate certificate is checked, starting from the original certificate all the way up to the root certificate. An intermediate, CA-signed certificate does not have the expected Basic Constraints or other important extensions. The root certificate has been compromised or authorized to the wrong party.

Consequences

Non-Repudiation: Hide Activities
Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design: Ensure that proper certificate checking is included in the system design.
Implementation: Understand, and properly implement all checks necessary to ensure the integrity of certificate trust integrity.
Implementation: If certificate pinning is being used, ensure that all relevant properties of the certificate are fully validated before the certificate is pinned, including the full chain of trust.

Recent advisories

GHSA-gvrj-cjch-728p — Juju has Improper TLS Client/Server authentication and certificate verification on Database Cluster

All advisories for CWE-296

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