Netty's wrapping plain trust manager silently disables hostname verification
CVE-2026-50010
What is CVE-2026-50010?
Netty is a network application framework for development of protocol servers and clients. Prior to versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final, SimpleTrustManagerFactory.engineGetTrustManagers() and related paths wrap any user-supplied plain X509TrustManager in X509TrustManagerWrapper, which extends X509ExtendedTrustManager but implements the 3-arg checkServerTrusted(chain, authType, SSLEngine) by discarding the SSLEngine and calling the 2-arg delegate. Because the object now IS an X509ExtendedTrustManager, neither SunJSSE's internal AbstractTrustManagerWrapper nor Netty's own OpenSslX509TrustManagerWrapper will re-wrap it to add endpoint-identification. Consequently, even though Netty 4.2 sets endpointIdentificationAlgorithm="HTTPS" by default, a client built with SslContextBuilder.forClient().trustManager(somePlainX509TrustManager) performs no hostname verification at all. Versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final patch the issue.
Affected Version(s)
netty >= 4.2.0.Final, < 4.2.15.Final < 4.2.0.Final, 4.2.15.Final
netty < 4.1.135.Final < 4.1.135.Final