An issue was discovered on D-Link DCS-1100 and DCS-1130 devices. The device has a custom telnet daemon as a part of the busybox and retrieves the password from the shadow file using the function getspnam at address 0x00053894. Then performs a crypt operation on the password retrieved from the user at address 0x000538E0 and performs a strcmp at address 0x00053908 to check if the password is correct or incorrect. However, the /etc/shadow file is a part of CRAM-FS filesystem which means that the user cannot change the password and hence a hardcoded hash in /etc/shadow is used to match the credentials provided by the user. This is a salted hash of the string admin and hence it acts as a password to the device which cannot be changed as the whole filesystem is read only.
Weakness
The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key.
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Dcs-1130_firmware |
Dlink |
- (including) |
- (including) |
Extended Description
There are two main variations:
Potential Mitigations
- For outbound authentication: store passwords, keys, and other credentials outside of the code in a strongly-protected, encrypted configuration file or database that is protected from access by all outsiders, including other local users on the same system. Properly protect the key (CWE-320). If you cannot use encryption to protect the file, then make sure that the permissions are as restrictive as possible [REF-7].
- In Windows environments, the Encrypted File System (EFS) may provide some protection.
- For inbound authentication using passwords: apply strong one-way hashes to passwords and store those hashes in a configuration file or database with appropriate access control. That way, theft of the file/database still requires the attacker to try to crack the password. When handling an incoming password during authentication, take the hash of the password and compare it to the saved hash.
- Use randomly assigned salts for each separate hash that is generated. This increases the amount of computation that an attacker needs to conduct a brute-force attack, possibly limiting the effectiveness of the rainbow table method.
- For front-end to back-end connections: Three solutions are possible, although none are complete.
References