CVE-2020-2499

A hard-coded password vulnerability has been reported to affect earlier versions of QES. If exploited, this vulnerability could allow attackers to log in with a hard-coded password. QNAP has already fixed the issue in QES 2.1.1 Build 20200515 and later.

Weakness

The product contains a hard-coded password, which it uses for its own inbound authentication or for outbound communication to external components.

Affected Software

Extended Description

There are two main variations of a hard-coded password:

Potential Mitigations

• For inbound authentication: apply strong one-way hashes to your 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 receiving an incoming password during authentication, take the hash of the password and compare it to the hash that you have saved.
• Use randomly assigned salts for each separate hash that you generate. 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

• https://www.qnap.com/zh-tw/security-advisory/qsa-20-19
• https://www.qnap.com/zh-tw/security-advisory/qsa-20-19