We observed that Intellispace Portal binaries doesn’t have any protection mechanisms to prevent reverse engineering. Specifically, the app’s code is not obfuscated, and no measures are in place to protect against decompilation, disassembly, or debugging. As a result, attackers can reverse-engineer the application to gain insights into its internal workings, which can potentially lead to the discovery of sensitive information, business logic flaws, and other vulnerabilities.
Utilizing this flaw, the attacker was able to identify the Hardcoded credentials from PortalUsersDatabase.dll, which contains .NET remoting definition. Inside the namespace PortalUsersDatabase, the class Users contains the functions CreateAdmin and CreateService that are used to initialize accounts in the Portal service. Both CreateAdmin and CreateService functions contain a hardcoded encrypted password along with its respective salt that are set with the function SetInitialPasswordAndSalt.
This issue affects IntelliSpace Portal: 12 and prior; Advanced Visualization Workspace: 15.
Weakness
The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key.
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