Improper Certificate Validation in Puppet

Previously, Puppet operated on the model that a node with a valid certificate was entitled to all information in the system and that a compromised certificate allowed access to everything in the infrastructure. When a node’s catalog falls back to the default node, the catalog can be retrieved for a different node by modifying facts for the Puppet run. This issue can be mitigated by setting strict_hostname_checking = true in puppet.conf on your Puppet master. Puppet 6.13.0 changes the default behavior for strict_hostname_checking from false to true. It is recommended that Puppet Open Source and Puppet Enterprise users that are not upgrading still set strict_hostname_checking to true to ensure secure behavior.