Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-36804 - Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password vulnerability in Akaunting
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
HIGH Integrity impact
HIGH Availability impact
NONE Summary
Akaunting version 2.1.12 and earlier suffers from a password reset spoofing vulnerability, wherein an attacker can proxy password reset requests through a running Akaunting instance, if that attacker knows the target's e-mail address. This issue was fixed in version 2.1.13 of the product. Please note that this issue is ultimately caused by the defaults provided by the Laravel framework, specifically how proxy headers are handled with respect to multi-tenant implementations. In other words, while this is not technically a vulnerability in Laravel, this default configuration is very likely to lead to practically identical identical vulnerabilities in Laravel projects that implement multi-tenant applications.
Vulnerable Configurations
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.