EDITF_ATTRIBUTESUBJECTALTNAME2

How securing printers can turn into a security disaster - and how the TameMyCerts Policy Module for Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) can prevent it

Nowadays, it is essential to protect the authentication of devices on the company network and administrative interfaces. As a rule, digital certificates are used for this purpose.

Printers therefore also generally require digital certificates in order to be operated securely. From a certain number of devices, there is no getting around automatic certificate distribution.

Some printer manufacturers offer centralized management solutions for certificate distribution.

Unfortunately, it has been shown time and again that the secure handling of digital certificates requires a great deal of knowledge, experience and care, which is often not the case.

How the TameMyCerts Policy Module for Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) can detect and prevent attacks against the ESC6 and ESC7 attack vectors

With the supposedly good intention of making it possible to issue such certificate requirements with a SAN, guess unfortunately much at many Instructions to set the flag on the certification authority EDITF_ATTRIBUTESUBJECTALTNAME2 to activate.

If this flag is activated, a very large attack surface is offered, as any applicant can now instruct the certification authority to issue certificates with any content. This type of attack is known in the security scene as ESC6 and ESC7 known.

How the TameMyCerts Policy Module for Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) can repair incoming certificate requests to make them RFC compliant

Starting with version 58, Google has decided to remove support for the Subject Distinguished Name of web server certificates in the Chrome browser and instead only accept certificates with Subject Alternative Name.

Since this moment, web server certificates without a subject alternative name in the form of a dNSName from Google Chrome and others Chromium-based browsers (i.e. also Microsoft Edge) was rejected. Other browser manufacturers quickly adopted this approach, so that this problem now affects all popular browsers.

Change the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) of a certificate before it is issued - but do it securely!

In net circulate unfortunately much at many Instructions (also the big players are not excluded from this, not even Microsoft itself or the Grand Master Komar), which fatally recommend that the flag EDITF_ATTRIBUTESUBJECTALTNAME2 should be set on the certification authority - supposedly to be able to issue certificates with Subject Alternative Name (SAN) extension for manually submitted certificate requests.

Unfortunately, this procedure is not only unnecessary, it also has some unpleasant side effects, which in the worst case can help an attacker to take over the entire Active Directory structure.

Active Directory forest compromised by EDITF_ATTRIBUTESUBJECTALTNAME2 flag

In net circulate unfortunately much at many Instructions (also the big players are not excluded from this, not even Microsoft itself or the Grand Master Komar), which fatally recommends that the EDITF_ATTRIBUTESUBJECTALTNAME2 flag should be set on the certification authority - supposedly to be able to issue Subject Alternative Name (SAN) extension certificates for manually submitted certificate requests.

Unfortunately, this approach is not only unnecessary, it also has some unpleasant side effects, which in the worst case can help an attacker to take over the entire Active Directory forest.