Appended period to hostnames can bypass HPKP and HSTS protections

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-0832  

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2015-13

Appended period to hostnames can bypass HPKP and HSTS protections

Announced
February 24, 2015
Reporter
Muneaki Nishimura
Impact
Moderate
Products
Firefox, Firefox OS, SeaMonkey
Fixed in
  • Firefox 36
  • Firefox OS 2.2
  • SeaMonkey 2.33

Description

Security researcher Muneaki Nishimura reported that when certificate pinning is set to "strict" mode, a period ('.') appended to a hostname in the address of a site allowed the bypass key pinning (HPKP) and HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). Sites with a period appended were treated as having a different origin than sites without the period. If an attacker had a security certificate for a domain with the added period, this would allow for a Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on users.

References