CVE-2026-42790

Publication date 29 May 2026

Last updated 2 June 2026

Ubuntu priority

Medium

Why this priority?

Description

Improper Certificate Validation vulnerability in Erlang OTP public_key (pubkey_cert and public_key modules) allows a DNS nameConstraints bypass via subject CommonName fallback in TLS hostname verification. Two flaws combine to allow a subordinate CA whose DNS nameConstraints are restricted (e.g. permitted;DNS:allowed.example.com) to issue a leaf certificate that an OTP TLS client accepts as a valid identity for an out-of-scope hostname (e.g. victim.example.com): First, pubkey_cert:validate_names/6 in lib/public_key/src/pubkey_cert.erl only checks SAN DNS entries against nameConstraints. Per RFC 5280, a permitted DNS subtree only restricts certificates that contain a DNS-typed name. A leaf with no subjectAltName therefore trivially satisfies any permitted;DNS:... constraint regardless of its subject commonName. Second, public_key:pkix_verify_hostname/3 in lib/public_key/src/public_key.erl falls back to the subject commonName when no subjectAltName is present, extracting id-at-commonName attributes as presented IDs and matching them against the reference hostname. The strict pkix_verify_hostname_match_fun(https) matcher does not suppress this fallback. The result is that path validation accepts a CN-only leaf under a DNS-constrained intermediate (no SAN means the nameConstraints are not triggered), and hostname verification then accepts it via the CN fallback. The bypass is reachable from stock ssl:connect with verify_peer, a trusted CA, SNI, and the canonical strict https hostname matcher. This issue affects OTP from OTP 19.3 before OTP 26.2.5.21, 27.3.4.12, 28.5.0.1, and 29.0.1 corresponding to public_key from 1.4 before 1.15.1.7, 1.17.1.3, 1.20.3.1, and 1.21.1.

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
erlang 26.04 LTS resolute
Needs evaluation
25.10 questing
Needs evaluation
24.04 LTS noble
Needs evaluation
22.04 LTS jammy
Needs evaluation
20.04 LTS focal
Needs evaluation
18.04 LTS bionic
Needs evaluation
16.04 LTS xenial
Needs evaluation
14.04 LTS trusty
Needs evaluation

References

Other references

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