Vulnerabilities > CVE-2014-3879 - Improper Authentication vulnerability in Freebsd
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
HIGH Integrity impact
HIGH Availability impact
HIGH Summary
OpenPAM Nummularia 9.2 through 10.0 does not properly handle the error reported when an include directive refers to a policy that does not exist, which causes the loaded policy chain to no be discarded and allows context-dependent attackers to bypass authentication via a login (1) without a password or (2) with an incorrect password.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| OS | 48 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Authentication Abuse An attacker obtains unauthorized access to an application, service or device either through knowledge of the inherent weaknesses of an authentication mechanism, or by exploiting a flaw in the authentication scheme's implementation. In such an attack an authentication mechanism is functioning but a carefully controlled sequence of events causes the mechanism to grant access to the attacker. This attack may exploit assumptions made by the target's authentication procedures, such as assumptions regarding trust relationships or assumptions regarding the generation of secret values. This attack differs from Authentication Bypass attacks in that Authentication Abuse allows the attacker to be certified as a valid user through illegitimate means, while Authentication Bypass allows the user to access protected material without ever being certified as an authenticated user. This attack does not rely on prior sessions established by successfully authenticating users, as relied upon for the "Exploitation of Session Variables, Resource IDs and other Trusted Credentials" attack patterns.
- Exploiting Trust in Client (aka Make the Client Invisible) An attack of this type exploits a programs' vulnerabilities in client/server communication channel authentication and data integrity. It leverages the implicit trust a server places in the client, or more importantly, that which the server believes is the client. An attacker executes this type of attack by placing themselves in the communication channel between client and server such that communication directly to the server is possible where the server believes it is communicating only with a valid client. There are numerous variations of this type of attack.
- Utilizing REST's Trust in the System Resource to Register Man in the Middle This attack utilizes a REST(REpresentational State Transfer)-style applications' trust in the system resources and environment to place man in the middle once SSL is terminated. Rest applications premise is that they leverage existing infrastructure to deliver web services functionality. An example of this is a Rest application that uses HTTP Get methods and receives a HTTP response with an XML document. These Rest style web services are deployed on existing infrastructure such as Apache and IIS web servers with no SOAP stack required. Unfortunately from a security standpoint, there frequently is no interoperable identity security mechanism deployed, so Rest developers often fall back to SSL to deliver security. In large data centers, SSL is typically terminated at the edge of the network - at the firewall, load balancer, or router. Once the SSL is terminated the HTTP request is in the clear (unless developers have hashed or encrypted the values, but this is rare). The attacker can utilize a sniffer such as Wireshark to snapshot the credentials, such as username and password that are passed in the clear once SSL is terminated. Once the attacker gathers these credentials, they can submit requests to the web service provider just as authorized user do. There is not typically an authentication on the client side, beyond what is passed in the request itself so once this is compromised, then this is generally sufficient to compromise the service's authentication scheme.
- Man in the Middle Attack This type of attack targets the communication between two components (typically client and server). The attacker places himself in the communication channel between the two components. Whenever one component attempts to communicate with the other (data flow, authentication challenges, etc.), the data first goes to the attacker, who has the opportunity to observe or alter it, and it is then passed on to the other component as if it was never intercepted. This interposition is transparent leaving the two compromised components unaware of the potential corruption or leakage of their communications. The potential for Man-in-the-Middle attacks yields an implicit lack of trust in communication or identify between two components.
Nessus
| NASL family | FreeBSD Local Security Checks |
| NASL id | FREEBSD_PKG_6E8F9003600711E6A6C314DAE9D210B8.NASL |
| description | The OpenPAM library searches for policy definitions in several locations. While doing so, the absence of a policy file is a soft failure (handled by searching in the next location) while the presence of an invalid file is a hard failure (handled by returning an error to the caller). The policy parser returns the same error code (ENOENT) when a syntactically valid policy references a non-existent module as when the requested policy file does not exist. The search loop regards this as a soft failure and looks for the next similarly-named policy, without discarding the partially-loaded configuration. A similar issue can arise if a policy contains an include directive that refers to a non-existent policy. Impact : If a module is removed, or the name of a module is misspelled in the policy file, the PAM library will proceed with a partially loaded configuration. Depending on the exact circumstances, this may result in a fail-open scenario where users are allowed to log in without a password, or with an incorrect password. In particular, if a policy references a module installed by a package or port, and that package or port is being reinstalled or upgraded, there is a brief window of time during which the module is absent and policies that use it may fail open. This can be especially damaging to Internet-facing SSH servers, which are regularly subjected to brute-force scans. |
| last seen | 2020-03-18 |
| modified | 2016-08-12 |
| plugin id | 92903 |
| published | 2016-08-12 |
| reporter | This script is Copyright (C) 2016-2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof. |
| source | https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/92903 |
| title | FreeBSD : FreeBSD -- Incorrect error handling in PAM policy parser (6e8f9003-6007-11e6-a6c3-14dae9d210b8) |
| code | |