CVE-2025-59154: igniterealtime openfire Authentication Bypass by Spoofing

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2025-59154 is a medium (CVSS 5.9) Authentication Bypass by Spoofing vulnerability in igniterealtime openfire. EPSS estimates a 0.23% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 13.4% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 15-09-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 15-09-2025
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

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.

• CWE-290Authentication Bypass by SpoofingThis attack-focused weakness is caused by incorrectly implemented authentication schemes that are subject to spoofing attacks.