Use of Password System for Primary Authentication

Background

Password systems are the simplest and most ubiquitous authentication mechanisms. However, they are subject to such well known attacks,and such frequent compromise that their use in the most simple implementation is not practical.

Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

In both of these examples, a user is logged in if their given password matches a stored password:

unsigned char *check_passwd(char *plaintext) {
  ctext = simple_digest("sha1",plaintext,strlen(plaintext), ... );
  //Login if hash matches stored hash
  if (equal(ctext, secret_password())) {
    login_user();
  }
}

String plainText = new String(plainTextIn);
MessageDigest encer = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA");
encer.update(plainTextIn);
byte[] digest = password.digest();
//Login if hash matches stored hash
if (equal(digest,secret_password())) {
  login_user();
}

This code relies exclusively on a password mechanism (CWE-309) using only one factor of authentication (CWE-308). If an attacker can steal or guess a user's password, they are given full access to their account. Note this code also uses SHA-1, which is a weak hash (CWE-328). It also does not use a salt (CWE-759).

See Also