HexChat doesn't check that the server-offered certificate really corresponds to the domain name HexChat is connecting to. In other words, it will accept any certificate, as long as it is signed by one of CAs that OpenSSL trusts.
Attack example: Mallet registers a domain name super.hacker.com and obtains a valid CA-signed SSL certificate for this domain. When Alice is connecting to chat.freenode.net, Mallet MITMs the connection and supplies his own certificate to Alice. Since it is not verified that the certificate actually corresponds to chat.freenode.net, verification succeeds and the secure connection is now compromised.
I love how they try to pretend to know what we think:
these people are not concerned that a man-in-the-middle attacker may intentionally set up something to read or modify their traffic
Which is complete BS btw. This was probably marked an enhancement because it required writing a feature and wasn't a bug in existing code. And obviously we fixed it...
HexChat doesn't check that the server-offered certificate really corresponds to the domain name HexChat is connecting to. In other words, it will accept any certificate, as long as it is signed by one of CAs that OpenSSL trusts.
Attack example: Mallet registers a domain name super.hacker.com and obtains a valid CA-signed SSL certificate for this domain. When Alice is connecting to chat.freenode.net, Mallet MITMs the connection and supplies his own certificate to Alice. Since it is not verified that the certificate actually corresponds to chat.freenode.net, verification succeeds and the secure connection is now compromised.
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