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.

References

• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-31421
• https://discuss.elastic.co/t/beats-elastic-agent-apm-server-and-fleet-server-8-10-1-security-update-improper-certificate-validation-issue-esa-2023-16/343385
• https://www.elastic.co/community/security