Description

JRuby-OpenSSL has hostname verification disabled by default

Summary

When verifying SSL certificates, jruby-openssl is not verifying that the hostname presented in the certificate matches the one we are trying to connect to, meaning a MITM could just present any valid cert for a completely different domain they own, and JRuby wouldn't complain.

Details

n/a

PoC

An example domain bad.substitutealert.com was created to present the a certificate for the domain s8a.me. The following script run in IRB in CRuby 3.4.3 will fail with certificate verify failed (hostname mismatch), but will work just fine in JRuby 10.0.0.0 and JRuby 9.4.2.0, both of which use jruby-openssl version 0.15.3

require "net/http"
require "openssl"

uri   = URI("https://bad.substitutealert.com/")
https = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
https.use_ssl      = true
https.verify_mode  = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER
...
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Impact

Anybody using JRuby to make requests of external APIs, or scraping the web, that depends on https to connect securely

Mitigation

Aliases

References