CVE-2026-107938

9.1 CRITICAL

Published 2026-10-09 · Updated 2026-10-15

AI risk analysis

Summary: Apache CXF's Netty HTTP client fails to verify TLS certificate hostnames, allowing attackers to impersonate services using any valid certificate. This creates a man-in-the-middle vulnerability where attackers can intercept and modify communications without detection.
Exploitability: Easy to exploit for network attackers who can intercept traffic; requires no special privileges or user interaction, just the ability to present a trusted certificate during TLS handshake.
Blast radius: High impact across all systems using affected CXF versions for HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 communications, potentially exposing credentials and sensitive data exchanged with impersonated services.
Detection: No reliable host or network indicator is derivable from the published description.
Prioritized remediation: Upgrade to Apache CXF versions 4.2.4, 4.1.9, or 3.6.13 which contain the fix for hostname verification in Netty-based HTTP client transport.

tlsmitmhttp

Analysis generated locally by garnet-coder (no data left the box). AI-assisted — verify against primary sources before acting.

NVD description

In Apache CXF, the Netty-based HTTP client transport (cxf-rt-transports-http-netty-client) did not verify that the hostname in the server’s TLS certificate matched the host being called. This applied over both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, even when disableCNCheck was left at its default value of false. The certificate chain was validated against the configured trust store, but the endpoint’s identity was not. A network attacker able to intercept traffic could present any certificate trusted by the client, such as a publicly issued certificate for a domain they control, and impersonate the target service. They could then read or modify the exchanged messages, including credentials. Users are recommended to upgrade to versions 4.2.4 or 4.1.9 or 3.6.13, which fix this issue.

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

Weaknesses

CWE-297

All references

Source data: NVD (nvd.nist.gov), public domain. Exploit-DB.ai adds local AI analysis for defensive use only.

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