User impersonation via malformed certificate CN parsing
Published Jun 9, 2026 · Updated Jun 9, 2026
Improper authentication in affected Spring Security releases allows remote authenticated users to impersonate another user via X.509 certificates. SubjectDnX509PrincipalExtractor applies a regular expression to the legacy getSubjectDN().getName() string, allowing a malformed CN to be parsed as another username. Exploitation requires X.509 pre-authentication and presupposes compromise of the trusted upstream that validates the certificate.
Summary
What happened
Improper authentication in affected Spring Security releases allows remote authenticated users to impersonate another user via X.509 certificates. SubjectDnX509PrincipalExtractor applies a regular expression to the legacy getSubjectDN().getName() string, allowing a malformed CN to be parsed as another username. Exploitation requires X.509 pre-authentication and presupposes compromise of the trusted upstream that validates the certificate.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-47838
- Published
- Jun 9, 2026
- Updated
- Jun 9, 2026
- Vendor
- Spring
- Product
- Spring Security
- Classifications
- CWE-287, T1078
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- authenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Jun 9, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Jun 9, 2026Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=5.7.0 <5.7.25
- Affected versionversion=5.8.0 <5.8.27
- Affected versionversion=6.3.0 <6.3.18
- Affected versionversion=6.4.0 <6.4.18
- Affected versionversion=6.5.0 <6.5.11
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Public exploit references
No public exploit references are available in this record.
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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