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CVE-2026-50010GHSA-C653-97M9-RCG9

Netty's wrapping plain trust manager silently disables hostname verification

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 4.2.15.Final, 4.1.135.Final
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: yes
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

Netty is a network application framework for development of protocol servers and clients. Prior to versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final, SimpleTrustManagerFactory.engineGetTrustManagers() and related paths wrap any user-supplied plain X509TrustManager in X509TrustManagerWrapper, which extends X509ExtendedTrustManager but implements the 3-arg checkServerTrusted(chain, authType, SSLEngine) by discarding the SSLEngine and calling the 2-arg delegate. Because the object now IS an X509ExtendedTrustManager, neither SunJSSE's internal AbstractTrustManagerWrapper nor Netty's own OpenSslX509TrustManagerWrapper will re-wrap it to add endpoint-identification. Consequently, even though Netty 4.2 sets endpointIdentificationAlgorithm="HTTPS" by default, a client built with `SslContextBuilder.forClient().trustManager(somePlainX509TrustManager)` performs no hostname verification at all. Versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final patch the issue.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • netty netty

    From 4.2.0.Final · fixed in 4.2.15.Final; fixed in 4.1.135.Final

  • io.netty:netty-handlerMaven

    From 4.2.0.Final · fixed in 4.2.15.Final

  • io.netty:netty-handlerMaven

    fixed in 4.1.135.Final

References 3

GitHub · netty/netty