CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-5399

Use of Hard-coded Credentials

Published: Oct 08, 2018 | Modified: Nov 21, 2024
CVSS 3.x
9.8
CRITICAL
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
10 HIGH
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

The Auto-Maskin DCU 210E firmware contains an undocumented Dropbear SSH server, v2015.55, configured to listen on Port 22 while the DCU is running. The Dropbear server is configured with a hard-coded user name and password combination of root / amroot. The server is configured to use password only authentication not cryptographic keys, however the firmware image contains an RSA host-key for the server. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to gain root access to the Angstrom Linux operating system and modify any binaries or configuration files in the firmware. Affected releases are Auto-Maskin DCU-210E RP-210E: Versions prior to 3.7 on ARMv7.

Weakness

The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Dcu-210e_firmware Auto-maskin * 3.7 (excluding)

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