Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-17401 - Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password vulnerability in Phonepe 3.0.6/3.3.26
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
HIGH Integrity impact
HIGH Availability impact
HIGH Summary
The PhonePe wallet (aka com.PhonePe.app) application 3.0.6 through 3.3.26 for Android might allow attackers to perform Account Takeover attacks by exploiting its Forgot Password feature. NOTE: the vendor says that, to exploit this, the user has to explicitly install a malicious app and provide accessibility permission to the malicious app, that the Android platform provides fair warnings to the users before turning on accessibility for any application, and that it believes it is similar to installing malicious keyboards, or malicious apps taking screenshots
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 2 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Password Recovery Exploitation An attacker may take advantage of the application feature to help users recover their forgotten passwords in order to gain access into the system with the same privileges as the original user. Generally password recovery schemes tend to be weak and insecure. Most of them use only one security question . For instance, mother's maiden name tends to be a fairly popular one. Unfortunately in many cases this information is not very hard to find, especially if the attacker knows the legitimate user. These generic security questions are also re-used across many applications, thus making them even more insecure. An attacker could for instance overhear a coworker talking to a bank representative at the work place and supplying their mother's maiden name for verification purposes. An attacker can then try to log in into one of the victim's accounts, click on "forgot password" and there is a good chance that the security question there will be to provide mother's maiden name. A weak password recovery scheme totally undermines the effectiveness of a strong password scheme.