CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-21672 — make-ca is a utility to deliver and manage a complete PKI configuration for workstations and servers

Medium CVSS 6.5

make-ca is a utility to deliver and manage a complete PKI configuration for workstations and servers. Starting with version 0.9 and prior to version 1.10, make-ca misinterprets Mozilla certdata.txt and treats explicitly untrusted certificates like trusted ones, causing those explicitly untrusted certificates trusted by the system. The explicitly untrusted certificates were used by some CAs already hacked. Hostile attackers may perform a MIM attack exploiting them. Everyone using the affected versions of make-ca should upgrade to make-ca-1.10, and run `make-ca -f -g` as the `root` user to regenerate the trusted store immediately. As a workaround, users may delete the untrusted certificates from /etc/pki/tls and /etc/ssl/certs manually (or by a script), but this is not recommended because the manual changes will be overwritten next time running make-ca to update the trusted anchor.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-01-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-115

Affected products

  • linuxfromscratch / make-ca

Matched remediation archetype

General vulnerability remediation

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

Check exposure

  • Confirm the affected component, deployment paths, reachable interfaces, and enabled features from inventories and configuration, without probing production destructively.
  • Compare the advisory's affected conditions with the repository lockfiles, build manifests, artifacts, and runtime inventory.
  • Identify data sensitivity, trust boundaries, and privilege level for every confirmed affected deployment.

Remediate safely

  • Apply a vendor-supported fix or remove the affected component or feature; record the selected change and its source in the repository.
  • Update direct and transitive dependency locks, generated artifacts, deployment manifests, and asset inventories together.
  • Add a regression test for the documented unsafe condition using inert inputs and preserve rollback instructions.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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