A vulnerability in the management web interface of Cisco Network Assurance Engine (NAE) could allow an unauthenticated, local attacker to gain unauthorized access or cause a Denial of Service (DoS) condition on the server. The vulnerability is due to a fault in the password management system of NAE. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating with the default administrator password via the CLI of an affected server. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to view potentially sensitive information or bring the server down, causing a DoS condition. This vulnerability affects Cisco Network Assurance Engine (NAE) Release 3.0(1). The default password condition only affects new installations of Release 3.0(1).
Weakness
The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key.
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Network_assurance_engine |
Cisco |
3.0(1) (including) |
3.0(1) (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