Vulnerabilities > CVE-2020-7245 - Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password vulnerability in Ctfd
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
MEDIUM Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
PARTIAL Integrity impact
PARTIAL Availability impact
PARTIAL Summary
Incorrect username validation in the registration process of CTFd v2.0.0 - v2.2.2 allows an attacker to take over an arbitrary account if the username is known and emails are enabled on the CTFd instance. To exploit the vulnerability, one must register with a username identical to the victim's username, but with white space inserted before and/or after the username. This will register the account with the same username as the victim. After initiating a password reset for the new account, CTFd will reset the victim's account password due to the username collision.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 16 |
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.