Vulnerabilities > CVE-2023-44399 - Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password vulnerability in Zitadel
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
LOW Integrity impact
NONE Availability impact
NONE Summary
ZITADEL provides identity infrastructure. In versions 2.37.2 and prior, ZITADEL administrators can enable a setting called "Ignoring unknown usernames" which helps mitigate attacks that try to guess/enumerate usernames. While this settings was properly working during the authentication process it did not work correctly on the password reset flow. This meant that even if this feature was active that an attacker could use the password reset function to verify if an account exist within ZITADEL. This bug has been patched in versions 2.37.3 and 2.38.0. No known workarounds are available.
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.