CVE-2023-22746

CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. When creating a new container based on one of the Docker images listed below, the same secret key was being used by default. If the users didnt set a custom value via environment variables in the .env file, that key was shared across different CKAN instances, making it easy to forge authentication requests. Users overriding the default secret key in their own .env file are not affected by this issue. Note that the legacy images (ckan/ckan) located in the main CKAN repo are not affected by this issue. The affected images are ckan/ckan-docker, (ckan/ckan-base images), okfn/docker-ckan (openknowledge/ckan-base and openknowledge/ckan-dev images) keitaroinc/docker-ckan (keitaro/ckan images).

Weakness

The product uses insufficiently random numbers or values in a security context that depends on unpredictable numbers.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Use a well-vetted algorithm that is currently considered to be strong by experts in the field, and select well-tested implementations with adequate length seeds.
• In general, if a pseudo-random number generator is not advertised as being cryptographically secure, then it is probably a statistical PRNG and should not be used in security-sensitive contexts.
• Pseudo-random number generators can produce predictable numbers if the generator is known and the seed can be guessed. A 256-bit seed is a good starting point for producing a “random enough” number.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/112.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/485.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/59.html

References

• https://github.com/ckan/ckan/commit/44af0f0a148fcc0e0fbcf02fe69b7db13459a84b
• https://github.com/ckan/ckan/commit/4c22c135fa486afa13855d1cdb9765eaf418d2aa
• https://github.com/ckan/ckan/security/advisories/GHSA-pr8j-v4c8-h62x