Who should read this bulletin: Customers using Microsoft® Windows®, Office for Mac, Internet Explorer for Mac, or Outlook Express for Mac.

Maximum Severity Rating: Critical

The IETF Profile of the X.509 certificate standard defines several optional fields that can be included in a digital certificate. One of these is the Basic Constraints field, which indicates the maximum allowable length of the certificate?s chain and whether the certificate is a Certificate Authority or an end-entity certificate. However, the APIs within CryptoAPI that construct and validate certificate chains (CertGetCertificateChain(), CertVerifyCertificateChainPolicy(), and WinVerifyTrust()) do not check the Basic Constraints field. The same flaw, unrelated to CryptoAPI, is also present in several Microsoft products for Macintosh.

Affected Software:

Microsoft Windows 98
Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Microsoft Windows Me
Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Terminal Server Edition
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Office for Mac
Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac
Microsoft Outlook Express for Mac

Download Certificate Validation Flaw Could Enable Identity Spoofing (Q328145)