The NATS official Rust clients are vulnerable to MitM when using TLS.

The common name of the server's TLS certificate is validated against the hostname provided by the server's plaintext INFO message during the initial connection setup phase. A MitM proxy can tamper with the host field's value by substituting it with the common name of a valid certificate it controls, fooling the client into accepting it.

Reproduction steps

1. The NATS Rust client tries to establish a new connection
2. The connection is intercepted by a MitM proxy
3. The proxy makes a separate connection to the NATS server
4. The NATS server replies with an INFO message
5. The proxy reads the INFO, alters the host JSON field and passes the tampered INFO back to the client
6. The proxy upgrades the client connection to TLS, presenting a certificate issued by a certificate authority present in the client's keychain. In the previous step the host was set to the common name of said certificate
7. rustls accepts the certificate, having verified that the common name matches the attacker-controlled value it was given
8. The client has been fooled by the MitM proxy into accepting the attacker-controlled certificate

When this crate is given a pathological certificate chain to validate, it will spend CPU time exponential with the number of candidate certificates at each step of path building.

Both TLS clients and TLS servers that accept client certificate are affected.

We now give each path building operation a budget of 100 signature verifications.

The original webpki crate is also affected.

This was previously reported in the original crate https://github.com/briansmith/webpki/issues/69 and re-reported to us recently by Luke Malinowski.

If a close_notify alert is received during a handshake, complete_io does not terminate.

Callers which do not call complete_io are not affected.

rustls-tokio and rustls-ffi do not call complete_io and are not affected.

rustls::Stream and rustls::StreamOwned types use complete_io and are affected.

ring::aead::quic::HeaderProtectionKey::new_mask() may panic when overflow checking is enabled. In the QUIC protocol, an attacker can induce this panic by sending a specially-crafted packet. Even unintentionally it is likely to occur in 1 out of every 2**32 packets sent and/or received.

On 64-bit targets operations using ring::aead::{AES_128_GCM, AES_256_GCM} may panic when overflow checking is enabled, when encrypting/decrypting approximately 68,719,476,700 bytes (about 64 gigabytes) of data in a single chunk. Protocols like TLS and SSH are not affected by this because those protocols break large amounts of data into small chunks. Similarly, most applications will not attempt to encrypt/decrypt 64GB of data in one chunk.

Overflow checking is not enabled in release mode by default, but RUSTFLAGS="-C overflow-checks" or overflow-checks = true in the Cargo.toml profile can override this. Overflow checking is usually enabled by default in debug mode.

Impact

When user-provided input is provided to any type that parses with the RFC 2822 format, a denial of service attack via stack exhaustion is possible. The attack relies on formally deprecated and rarely-used features that are part of the RFC 2822 format used in a malicious manner. Ordinary, non-malicious input will never encounter this scenario.

Patches

A limit to the depth of recursion was added in v0.3.47. From this version, an error will be returned rather than exhausting the stack.

Workarounds

Limiting the length of user input is the simplest way to avoid stack exhaustion, as the amount of the stack consumed would be at most a factor of the length of the input.