CVE-2021-28813

A vulnerability involving insecure storage of sensitive information has been reported to affect QSW-M2116P-2T2S and QNAP switches running QuNetSwitch. If exploited, this vulnerability allows remote attackers to read sensitive information by accessing the unrestricted storage mechanism.We have already fixed this vulnerability in the following versions: QSW-M2116P-2T2S 1.0.6 build 210713 and later QGD-1600P: QuNetSwitch 1.0.6.1509 and later QGD-1602P: QuNetSwitch 1.0.6.1509 and later QGD-3014PT: QuNetSwitch 1.0.6.1519 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/en/security-advisory/qsa-21-37
• https://www.qnap.com/en/security-advisory/qsa-21-37