CrowdStrike uses industry-standard TLS (transport layer security) to secure communications from the Falcon sensor to the CrowdStrike cloud. CrowdStrike has identified a validation logic error in the Falcon sensor for Linux, Falcon Kubernetes Admission Controller, and Falcon Container Sensor where our TLS connection routine to the CrowdStrike cloud can incorrectly process server certificate validation. This could allow an attacker with the ability to control network traffic to potentially conduct a man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack. CrowdStrike identified this issue internally and released a security fix in all Falcon sensor for Linux, Falcon Kubernetes Admission Controller, and Falcon Container Sensor versions 7.06 and above.
CrowdStrike identified this issue through our longstanding, rigorous security review process, which has been continually strengthened with deeper source code analysis and ongoing program enhancements as part of our commitment to security resilience. CrowdStrike has no indication of any exploitation of this issue in the wild. CrowdStrike has leveraged its world class threat hunting and intelligence capabilities to actively monitor for signs of abuse or usage of this flaw and will continue to do so.
Windows and Mac sensors are not affected by this.
The product does not follow, or incorrectly follows, the chain of trust for a certificate back to a trusted root certificate, resulting in incorrect trust of any resource that is associated with that certificate.
If a system does not follow the chain of trust of a certificate to a root server, the certificate loses all usefulness as a metric of trust. Essentially, the trust gained from a certificate is derived from a chain of trust – with a reputable trusted entity at the end of that list. The end user must trust that reputable source, and this reputable source must vouch for the resource in question through the medium of the certificate. In some cases, this trust traverses several entities who vouch for one another. The entity trusted by the end user is at one end of this trust chain, while the certificate-wielding resource is at the other end of the chain. If the user receives a certificate at the end of one of these trust chains and then proceeds to check only that the first link in the chain, no real trust has been derived, since the entire chain must be traversed back to a trusted source to verify the certificate. There are several ways in which the chain of trust might be broken, including but not limited to: