CVE-2024-12797

Technical Description

Issue summary: Clients using RFC7250 Raw Public Keys (RPKs) to authenticate a

server may fail to notice that the server was not authenticated, because

handshakes don't abort as expected when the SSL_VERIFY_PEER verification mode

is set.

Impact summary: TLS and DTLS connections using raw public keys may be

vulnerable to man-in-middle attacks when server authentication failure is not

detected by clients.

RPKs are disabled by default in both TLS clients and TLS servers. The issue

only arises when TLS clients explicitly enable RPK use by the server, and the

server, likewise, enables sending of an RPK instead of an X.509 certificate

chain. The affected clients are those that then rely on the handshake to

fail when the server's RPK fails to match one of the expected public keys,

by setting the verification mode to SSL_VERIFY_PEER.

Clients that enable server-side raw public keys can still find out that raw

public key verification failed by calling SSL_get_verify_result(), and those

that

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories, patches, and mitigation guidance. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

References