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Weakness (CWE)

CWE-296: Improper Following of a Certificate's Chain of Trust

Base Draft

The product does not follow, or incorrectly follows, the chain of trust for a certificate back to a trusted root certificate.

More detail

There are several ways in which the chain of trust might be broken, including but not limited to:

- Any certificate in the chain is self-signed, unless it is the root.

- Not every intermediate certificate is checked, starting from the original certificate all the way up to the root certificate.

- An intermediate, CA-signed certificate does not have the expected Basic Constraints or other important extensions.

- The root certificate has been compromised or authorized to the wrong party.

How to prevent it (3 mitigations)

  1. Architecture and Design

    Ensure that proper certificate checking is included in the system design.

  2. Implementation

    Understand, and properly implement all checks necessary to ensure the integrity of certificate trust integrity.

  3. Implementation

    If certificate pinning is being used, ensure that all relevant properties of the certificate are fully validated before the certificate is pinned, including the full chain of trust.

Source: MITRE CWE-296

All Critical High Medium Low Exploited only Public exploit

5 results · Clear filters · Feed

  • Critical 9.3
    CVE-2026-96770

    s2s-proxy accepts untrusted client certificates

    All published s2s-proxy versions through 0.2.2 are affected. In versions 0.1.16 through 0.2.2, TLS server listeners use Go's RequireAnyClientCert mode when skipCAVerification is false. This mode checks that the client holds the certificate's private key but d…

    Temporal Technologies s2s-proxy
  • Critical 10.0
    CVE-2026-4370

    Improper TLS Client/Server authentication and certificate verification on Database Cluster

    A vulnerability was identified in Juju from version 3.2.0 until 3.6.19 and from version 4.0 until 4.0.4, where the internal Dqlite database cluster fails to perform proper TLS client and server authentication. Specifically, the Juju controller's database endp…

    Canonical Juju github.com/juju/juju Go
  • Critical 9.4
    CVE-2025-12383

    Race Condition allows Bypass of Trust Restrictions

    In Eclipse Jersey versions 2.45, 3.0.16, 3.1.9 a race condition can cause ignoring of critical SSL configurations - such as mutual authentication, custom key/trust stores, and other security settings. This issue may result in SSLHandshakeException under norma…

    Eclipse Foundation Jersey org.glassfish.jersey.core:jersey-client Maven
  • Critical 9.3
    CVE-2025-48057

    Icinga 2 certificate renewal might incorrectly renew an invalid certificate

    Icinga 2 is a monitoring system which checks the availability of network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. Prior to versions 2.12.12, 2.13.12, and 2.14.6, the VerifyCertificate() function can be tricked into i…

    Icinga icinga2 icinga2 icinga2 Debian Ubuntu
  • Critical 9.0
    CVE-2021-23155

    Improper validation of the cloud certificate chain in Mobile Client allows man-in-the-middle attack to impersonate the …

    Gallagher Command Centre Mobile Client for Android Android