Honeywell ControlEdge through R151.1 uses Hard-coded Credentials. According to FSCT-2022-0056, there is a Honeywell ControlEdge hardcoded credentials issue. The affected components are characterized as: SSH. The potential impact is: Remote code execution, manipulate configuration, denial of service. The Honeywell ControlEdge PLC and RTU product line exposes an SSH service on port 22/TCP. Login as root to this service is permitted and credentials for the root user are hardcoded without automatically changing them upon first commissioning. The credentials for the SSH service are hardcoded in the firmware. The credentials grant an attacker access to a root shell on the PLC/RTU, allowing for remote code execution, configuration manipulation and denial of service.
Weakness
The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key.
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Controledge_plc_firmware |
Honeywell |
* |
r151.2 (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