Threats affecting pkg:golang/crypto/x509

On most platforms, Go uses the given system root certificates. However, in some narrower cases, the system trust stores may not be updated without further action. To defend against the narrower set of cases that may remain affected, a denylist was added in crypto/x509 to return an error when calling Verify with any of the known intermediate certificates that are no longer considered to be trustworthy.

(*x509.Certificate).VerifyHostname previously called matchHostnames in a loop over all DNS Subject Alternative Name (SAN) entries. This caused strings.Split(host, ".") to execute repeatedly on the same input hostname. With a large DNS SAN list, verification costs scaled quadratically based on the number of SAN entries multiplied by the hostname's label count. Because x509.Verify validates hostnames before building the certificate chain, this overhead occurred even for untrusted certificates.

During chain building, the amount of work that is done is not correctly limited when a large number of intermediate certificates are passed in VerifyOptions.Intermediates, which can lead to a denial of service. This affects both direct users of crypto/x509 and users of crypto/tls.

Validating certificate chains which use policies is unexpectedly inefficient when certificates in the chain contain a very large number of policy mappings, possibly causing denial of service. This only affects validation of otherwise trusted certificate chains, issued by a root CA in the VerifyOptions.Roots CertPool, or in the system certificate pool.

When verifying a certificate chain containing excluded DNS constraints, these constraints are not correctly applied to wildcard DNS SANs which use a different case than the constraint. This only affects validation of otherwise trusted certificate chains, issued by a root CA in the VerifyOptions.Roots CertPool, or in the system certificate pool.

Certificate verification can panic when a certificate in the chain has an empty DNS name and another certificate in the chain has excluded name constraints. This can crash programs that are either directly verifying X.509 certificate chains, or those that use TLS.

When verifying a certificate chain which contains a certificate containing multiple email address constraints which share common local portions but different domain portions, these constraints will not be properly applied, and only the last constraint will be considered.