Vulnerabilities > CVE-2022-23610 - Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature vulnerability in Wire Wire-Server
Summary
wire-server provides back end services for Wire, an open source messenger. In versions of wire-server prior to the 2022-01-27 release, it was possible to craft DSA Signatures to bypass SAML SSO and impersonate any Wire user with SAML credentials. In teams with SAML, but without SCIM, it was possible to create new accounts with fake SAML credentials. Under certain conditions that can be established by an attacker, an upstream library for parsing, rendering, signing, and validating SAML XML data was accepting public keys as trusted that were provided by the attacker in the signature. As a consequence, the attacker could login as any user in any Wire team with SAML SSO enabled. If SCIM was not enabled, the attacker could also create new users with new SAML NameIDs. In order to exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs to know the SSO login code (distributed to all team members with SAML credentials and visible in the Team Management app), the SAML EntityID identifying the IdP (a URL not considered sensitive, but usually hard to guess, also visible in Team Management), and the SAML NameID of the user (usually an email address or a nick). The issue has been fixed in wire-server `2022-01-27` and is already deployed on all Wire managed services. On premise instances of wire-server need to be updated to `2022-01-27`, so that their backends are no longer affected. There are currently no known workarounds. More detailed information about how to reproduce the vulnerability and mitigation strategies is available in the GitHub Security Advisory.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 1 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Padding Oracle Crypto Attack An attacker is able to efficiently decrypt data without knowing the decryption key if a target system leaks data on whether or not a padding error happened while decrypting the ciphertext. A target system that leaks this type of information becomes the padding oracle and an attacker is able to make use of that oracle to efficiently decrypt data without knowing the decryption key by issuing on average 128*b calls to the padding oracle (where b is the number of bytes in the ciphertext block). In addition to performing decryption, an attacker is also able to produce valid ciphertexts (i.e., perform encryption) by using the padding oracle, all without knowing the encryption key. Any cryptosystem can be vulnerable to padding oracle attacks if the encrypted messages are not authenticated to ensure their validity prior to decryption, and then the information about padding error is leaked to the attacker. This attack technique may be used, for instance, to break CAPTCHA systems or decrypt/modify state information stored in client side objects (e.g., hidden fields or cookies). This attack technique is a side-channel attack on the cryptosystem that uses a data leak from an improperly implemented decryption routine to completely subvert the cryptosystem. The one bit of information that tells the attacker whether a padding error during decryption has occurred, in whatever form it comes, is sufficient for the attacker to break the cryptosystem. That bit of information can come in a form of an explicit error message about a padding error, a returned blank page, or even the server taking longer to respond (a timing attack). This attack can be launched cross domain where an attacker is able to use cross-domain information leaks to get the bits of information from the padding oracle from a target system / service with which the victim is communicating. To do so an attacker sends a request containing ciphertext to the target system. Due to the browser's same origin policy, the attacker is not able to see the response directly, but can use cross-domain information leak techniques to still get the information needed (i.e., information on whether or not a padding error has occurred). For instance, this can be done using "img" tag plus the onerror()/onload() events. The attacker's JavaScript can make web browsers to load an image on the target site, and know if the image is loaded or not. This is 1-bit information needed for the padding oracle attack to work: if the image is loaded, then it is valid padding, otherwise it is not.