MatchTrustedPeer ignores the public key used, leading to forged CA clones passing verification

Overview

MatchTrustedPeer ignores the public key used, leading to forged CA clones passing verification. Affected builds are any that enable the macro WOLFSSL_TRUST_PEER_CERT and load CA certificates with wolfSSL_CTX_trust_peer_cert() or wolfSSL_trust_peer_cert(). The peer must know the certificates being loaded to either of those APIs to take advantage of the issue. When OPENSSL_COMPATIBLE_DEFAULTS is also defined this widens the affected API to include all CA certificate loading. Both macros are defined when using autoconf builds such as (nginx, haproxy, stunnel, wpas, apache httpd, hitch, bind, rsyslog, ffmpeg, all, distro). When the certificate is listed as a trusted peer certificate the issue previously allowed for a malicious (D)TLS server to bypass authentication once knowing which CA’s the client would accept. This also affects mutual authentication cases where the client knows which CA’s the server has loaded. If building with any of these configurations and using (D)TLS where the loaded CA’s could be known and authentication of the peer is desired, users should either: update to the latest wolfSSL version, apply the fix patch, or use the configure flag --disable-openssl-compatible-defaults and not load CA’s with wolfSSL_CTX_trust_peer_cert() or wolfSSL_trust_peer_cert() to mitigate the issue.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.