CVE-2026-118513
HighCVSS 7.7Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk19th percentile - higher than 19% of all known CVEs
Summary
A vulnerability in Symfony versions prior to 5.4.56, 6.x prior to 6.4.50, 7.x prior to 7.4.23, and 8.x prior to 8.1.11 allows authentication bypass in X509Authenticator and X509AuthenticationListener. An attacker holding a certificate from the application's trusted CA who can influence the CN can authenticate as an arbitrary user, including a privileged one. This follows an incomplete fix for CVE-2026-45063 — the regular expression used is not escape-aware when parsing the serialized DN.
Risk Assessment
The organization may be exposed to privilege escalation and unauthorized access if an attacker with a valid certificate from the trusted CA can impersonate a privileged user.
Recommendation
Update Symfony to version 5.4.56, 6.4.50, 7.4.23, or 8.1.11 (or later). If possible, configure the application to use a per-attribute user key (e.g., SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_Email) instead of extracting from the full DN.
Other vulnerabilities in Symfony
See all- CVE-2016-4423High
The attemptAuthentication function in Symfony before versions 2.3.41, 2.7.13, 2.8.6, and 3.0.6 does not limit the length of a username stored in a session. This allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service through a series of authentication attempts with long, non-existent usernames.
- CVE-2016-1902High
The nextBytes function in the SecureRandom class in Symfony before 2.3.37, 2.6.x before 2.6.13, and 2.7.x before 2.7.9 does not properly generate random numbers when used with PHP 5.x without the paragonie/random_compat library, and the openssl_random_pseudo_bytes function fails.
- CVE-2013-1397High
Symfony versions 2.0.x before 2.0.22, 2.1.x before 2.1.7, and 2.2.x are vulnerable to remote attacks that allow arbitrary PHP code execution via a serialized PHP object in the Yaml::parse or Yaml\Parser::parse functions.
- CVE-2013-1348High
The Yaml::parse function in Symfony 2.0.x before version 2.0.22 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary PHP code via a PHP file, which is a different vulnerability than CVE-2013-1397.
- CVE-2026-47767Critical
A vulnerability in Symfony allows an attacker to manipulate the APP_ENV and APP_DEBUG environment variables via a crafted query string that bypasses the protection introduced in CVE-2024-50340. The issue stems from a discrepancy between parse_str() and the web SAPI, enabling attacker-controlled --env or --no-debug flags to be passed to the script.
- CVE-2026-45069Critical
In Symfony up to versions 6.4.40, 7.4.12, and 8.0.12, the OidcTokenHandler::verifyClaims() method registered audience (aud), issuer (iss), and expiry (exp) checkers but did not pass the mandatory claims list to ClaimCheckerManager::check(). This allowed a validly signed JWT missing those claims to pass verification.
- CVE-2026-45063Critical
A vulnerability in Symfony X509Authenticator allows an attacker with a trusted certificate to impersonate a victim by placing emailAddress= in another RDN value, such as CN, due to an unanchored regex.
- CVE-2016-2403Critical
Symfony before 2.8.6 and 3.x before 3.0.6 allows remote attackers to bypass authentication by logging in with an empty password and valid username, which triggers an unauthenticated bind.
- CVE-2026-48784Medium
A vulnerability in Symfony allows an attacker to manipulate URL paths via controlled route parameters. The UrlGenerator::doGenerate() function uses strtr() dot-segment encoding that skips every other chained ../ or ./ segment, enabling generation of URLs that collapse to a different path under RFC 3986 normalization.
- CVE-2026-48761Medium
In Symfony PHP framework from 6.1.0 to 6.4.41, 7.4.13, and 8.0.13, UrlAttributeSanitizer::getSupportedAttributes() omitted URL-bearing attributes on <object>, <applet>, <iframe>, and <img>, and <meta http-equiv="refresh"> URLs bypassed sanitization, allowing javascript: payloads. Fixed in versions 6.4.41, 7.4.13, and 8.0.13.
Original NVD description (English source)
Authentication bypass by spoofing in X509Authenticator and X509AuthenticationListener of Symfony versions prior to 5.4.56, 6.x prior to 6.4.50, 7.x prior to 7.4.23, and 8.x prior to 8.1.11 allows an attacker holding a certificate from the application's trusted CA who can influence the CN to authenticate as an arbitrary user of the application, including a privileged one, following an incomplete fix for CVE-2026-45063. X509Authenticator extracts the user identifier from the Subject DN (Distinguished Name) that the web server passes in $_SERVER['SSL_CLIENT_S_DN']. The fix for CVE-2026-45063 anchored that extraction to an RDN (Relative Distinguished Name) boundary, but the regular expression used was not escape-aware. The expression runs against an already serialized DN, so it cannot tell an RDN separator from a separator character that occurs inside a value. Under RFC 2253, used by Apache and by nginx's $ssl_client_s_dn, a comma inside a value is escaped as \, and the expression reads it as a separator regardless. RFC 2253 also does not treat / as a separator, so it leaves it bare inside a value, while the expression treats every / as one. The legacy X509_NAME_oneline() format, used by Apache's LegacyDNStringFormat and by nginx's $ssl_client_s_dn_legacy, is the mirror image: it escapes / as \/ and leaves , bare. In that format, a certificate with no emailAddress attribute, or whose poisoned CN precedes it, authenticates as the smuggled address. To cover both RFC 2253 and the legacy X509_NAME_oneline() format, X509Authenticator and X509AuthenticationListener now split the DN into RDNs before looking for the attribute, instead of matching the attribute against the serialized string. They select the separator from the serialization, split on unescaped occurrences of that separator only, unescape each RDN afterwards with the rules of its format, and require the attribute to span a whole RDN. The accepted value grammar is unchanged. Applications that pass a per-attribute user key (such as SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_Email) and deployments whose CA generates or validates the subject are not affected by this vulnerability.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS