Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-20781 - Insufficiently Protected Credentials vulnerability in multiple products

047910
CVSS 2.1 - LOW
Attack vector
LOCAL
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
PARTIAL
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
NONE
local
low complexity
gnome
canonical
oracle
CWE-522
nessus

Summary

In pam/gkr-pam-module.c in GNOME Keyring before 3.27.2, the user's password is kept in a session-child process spawned from the LightDM daemon. This can expose the credential in cleartext.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
Application
Gnome
164
Application
Oracle
1
OS
Canonical
2

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Session Sidejacking
    Session sidejacking takes advantage of an unencrypted communication channel between a victim and target system. The attacker sniffs traffic on a network looking for session tokens in unencrypted traffic. Once a session token is captured, the attacker performs malicious actions by using the stolen token with the targeted application to impersonate the victim. This attack is a specific method of session hijacking, which is exploiting a valid session token to gain unauthorized access to a target system or information. Other methods to perform a session hijacking are session fixation, cross-site scripting, or compromising a user or server machine and stealing the session token.
  • Lifting credential(s)/key material embedded in client distributions (thick or thin)
    An attacker examines a target application's code or configuration files to find credential or key material that has been embedded within the application or its files. Many services require authentication with their users for the various purposes including billing, access control or attribution. Some client applications store the user's authentication credentials or keys to accelerate the login process. Some clients may have built-in keys or credentials (in which case the server is authenticating with the client, rather than the user). If the attacker is able to locate where this information is stored, they may be able to retrieve these credentials. The attacker could then use these stolen credentials to impersonate the user or client, respectively, in interactions with the service or use stolen keys to eavesdrop on nominally secure communications between the client and server.
  • 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.

Nessus

NASL familyUbuntu Local Security Checks
NASL idUBUNTU_USN-3894-1.NASL
descriptionIt was discovered that GNOME Keyring incorrectly cleared out credentials supplied to the PAM module. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to discover login credentials. Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.
last seen2020-06-01
modified2020-06-02
plugin id122480
published2019-02-27
reporterUbuntu Security Notice (C) 2019-2020 Canonical, Inc. / NASL script (C) 2019-2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof.
sourcehttps://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/122480
titleUbuntu 14.04 LTS / 16.04 LTS : gnome-keyring vulnerability (USN-3894-1)