CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-31421 — Elastic Elastic Beats security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

It was discovered that when acting as TLS clients, Beats, Elastic Agent, APM Server, and Fleet Server did not verify whether the server certificate is valid for the target IP address; however, certificate signature validation is still performed. More specifically, when the client is configured to connect to an IP address (instead of a hostname) it does not validate the server certificate's IP SAN values against that IP address and certificate validation fails, and therefore the connection is not blocked as expected.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-10-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-295

Affected products

  • elastic / elastic_beats
  • elastic / elastic_agent
  • elastic / apm_server
  • elastic / elastic_fleet_server

Matched remediation archetype

Cryptography, certificate, signature, and channel validation

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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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