Openfire <5.0.2 SASL EXTERNAL CN Regex & Impersonation
CVE-2025-59154 Published on September 15, 2025

Openfire allows potential identity spoofing via unsafe CN parsing
Openfire is an XMPP server licensed under the Open Source Apache License. Openfires 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.

NVD

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2025-59154 is exploitable with network access, and requires user privileges. This vulnerability is consided to have a high level of attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to have a high impact on confidentiality and integrity, and no impact on availability.

Attack Vector:
NETWORK
Attack Complexity:
HIGH
Privileges Required:
HIGH
User Interaction:
NONE
Scope:
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact:
HIGH
Integrity Impact:
HIGH
Availability Impact:
NONE

Weakness Type

Authentication Bypass by Spoofing

This attack-focused weakness is caused by improperly implemented authentication schemes that are subject to spoofing attacks.


Products Associated with CVE-2025-59154

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Igniterealtime Openfire
 

Affected Versions

igniterealtime Openfire Version < 5.0.2 is affected by CVE-2025-59154

Exploit Probability

EPSS
0.03%
Percentile
9.90%

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.