Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

Posted Nov 20, 2007 3:53 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability by lutchann
Parent article: Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

I donno. Good point.

I just figured being able to display a table requires less rights then being able to modify it
and since it's needed by the authentication stuff then it would be accessable to parts of the
website accessable by anonymous people.

Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

Posted Nov 20, 2007 6:09 UTC (Tue) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (5 responses)

For one thing, this type of problem would allow access to continue long after the broken code
is fixed, without the user knowing about it.  Also, because of the way the password is stored,
it would easy allow offline cracking of passwords, and users tend to reuse the same password
on different sites.

Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

Posted Nov 20, 2007 6:41 UTC (Tue) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (4 responses)

That's true of pretty much any authentication system, except those based on asymmetric
cryptography.  Wordpress is far from unusual in storing password equivalents on disk.  So
unless Wordpress somehow encouraged making the user table accessible to attackers, I still
don't see why this is a big deal.

Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

Posted Nov 20, 2007 9:15 UTC (Tue) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (3 responses)

It's true that any encrypted password can be attacked offline if you have the hash, but if the
passwords were properly salted, it would be much more expensive to crack them because an
attacker couldn't build a pre-encrypted dictionary.

Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

Posted Nov 20, 2007 16:10 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

Ya..

Google around for 'Rainbow tables'. There are ones you can download for free and ones you can
pay for. 

Just going out to pirate bay and doing a quick search I found downloads for MD5, SHA1, and NT
Lan manager tables.

Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

Posted Nov 20, 2007 18:21 UTC (Tue) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

The main purpose of salts is to combat things like rainbow tables.

Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

Posted Nov 20, 2007 19:12 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]

The main purpose of rainbow tables is to combat unsalted web apps ;-)