CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-28942 — An issue exists in PrimeKey EJBCA before 7.4.3 when enrolling with EST while proxied through an RA over the Peers protocol

Medium CVSS 4.3

An issue exists in PrimeKey EJBCA before 7.4.3 when enrolling with EST while proxied through an RA over the Peers protocol. As a part of EJBCA's domain security model, the peer connector allows the restriction of client certificates (for the RA, not the end user) to a limited set of allowed CAs, thus restricting the accessibility of that RA to the rights it has within a specific role. While this works for other protocols such as CMP, it was found that the EJBCA enrollment over an EST implementation bypasses this check, allowing enrollment with a valid client certificate through any functioning and authenticated RA connected to the CA. NOTE: an attacker must already have a trusted client certificate and authorization to enroll against the targeted CA.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.3 (3.1)
Published
2020-11-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-295

Affected products

  • primekey / ejbca

Matched remediation archetype

Cryptography, certificate, signature, and channel validation

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Inventory affected algorithms, key uses, trust stores, certificate validation settings, random sources, and plaintext channels across clients and services.
  • Determine which secrets, identities, signatures, or data protections depend on the affected primitive or validation path.
  • Check debug, compatibility, fallback, and hostname or audience override settings in build and runtime configuration.

Remediate safely

  • Use a maintained platform cryptographic API with approved algorithms, modes, parameters, randomness, and full peer identity validation.
  • Remove insecure fallback and validation bypasses; separate keys by purpose and load them from managed secret storage.
  • Plan rotation or reissuance for affected keys, certificates, tokens, hashes, or ciphertext and document compatibility sequencing.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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