Vulnerabilities > CVE-2020-14341 - Covert Timing Channel vulnerability in Redhat Single Sign-On
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
HIGH Confidentiality impact
LOW Integrity impact
NONE Availability impact
NONE Summary
The "Test Connection" available in v7.x of the Red Hat Single Sign On application console can permit an authorized user to cause SMTP connections to be attempted to arbitrary hosts and ports of the user's choosing, and originating from the RHSSO installation. By observing differences in the timings of these scans, an attacker may glean information about hosts and ports which they do not have access to scan directly.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 8 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Cross-Domain Search Timing An attacker initiates cross domain HTTP / GET requests and times the server responses. The timing of these responses may leak important information on what is happening on the server. Browser's same origin policy prevents the attacker from directly reading the server responses (in the absence of any other weaknesses), but does not prevent the attacker from timing the responses to requests that the attacker issued cross domain. For GET requests an attacker could for instance leverage the "img" tag in conjunction with "onload() / onerror()" javascript events. For the POST requests, an attacker could leverage the "iframe" element and leverage the "onload()" event. There is nothing in the current browser security model that prevents an attacker to use these methods to time responses to the attackers' cross domain requests. The timing for these responses leaks information. For instance, if a victim has an active session with their online e-mail account, an attacker could issue search requests in the victim's mailbox. While the attacker is not able to view the responses, based on the timings of the responses, the attacker could ask yes / no questions as to the content of victim's e-mails, who the victim e-mailed, when, etc. This is but one example; There are other scenarios where an attacker could infer potentially sensitive information from cross domain requests by timing the responses while asking the right questions that leak information.