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.
The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key, which it uses for its own inbound authentication, outbound communication to external components, or encryption of internal data.
Hard-coded credentials typically create a significant hole that allows an attacker to bypass the authentication that has been configured by the product administrator. This hole might be difficult for the system administrator to detect. Even if detected, it can be difficult to fix, so the administrator may be forced into disabling the product entirely. There are two main variations:
In the Inbound variant, a default administration account is created, and a simple password is hard-coded into the product and associated with that account. This hard-coded password is the same for each installation of the product, and it usually cannot be changed or disabled by system administrators without manually modifying the program, or otherwise patching the product. If the password is ever discovered or published (a common occurrence on the Internet), then anybody with knowledge of this password can access the product. Finally, since all installations of the product will have the same password, even across different organizations, this enables massive attacks such as worms to take place. The Outbound variant applies to front-end systems that authenticate with a back-end service. The back-end service may require a fixed password which can be easily discovered. The programmer may simply hard-code those back-end credentials into the front-end product. Any user of that program may be able to extract the password. Client-side systems with hard-coded passwords pose even more of a threat, since the extraction of a password from a binary is usually very simple.