mrb's blog

PivotX Security Flaw: Insecure Password Hashing

Keywords: md5 password pivotx security

As I was explaining in my first blog post at zorinaq.com, I would have liked to feel more comfortable about the security track record of the blog CMS I am using, PivotX. Today I started poking around and discovered the first security flaw. Like many web apps, PivotX hashes user passwords in an insecure way; it fails to implement password stretching. Its algorithm is just a basic salted MD5:

hash = MD5(password . salt)
where salt is 32-character string of random hexadecimal digits

Consequently, brute-forcing PivotX password hashes is very fast. For example ighashgpu can bruteforce this type of salted MD5 hash at a speed of about 3.3 billion passwords per second on a ATI HD 5870. PivotX hashes are stored in this file:

pivotx/db/ser_users.php:
...s:8:"username";s:5:"alice";
s:8:"password";s:32:"a8d96f2acf34505cc70fabf7acbd9be8";
s:4:"salt";s:32:"c9c132159c943876f6a1753102937d9a";...

The user/pw is alice/test and the hash can be verified with:

$ echo -n testc9c132159c943876f6a1753102937d9a | md5sum
a8d96f2acf34505cc70fabf7acbd9be8  -

Password stretching, or iterated hashing, is a technique to slow down brute force attacks. It consists of a primitive (a hash function) through which the password and the resulting hash is fed multiple times. Password stretching is standard in many areas: UNIX user accounts (MD5-based or Blowfish-based crypt), PGP-encrypted files (Iterated and Salted S2K), WPA PSK mode (iterated HMAC-SHA1), etc. PivotX has no reason to not implement it.

I believe the reason many web apps get password hashing wrong is because web developers are usually unfamiliar with this topic.

[Updated: I reported the issue to the PivotX developers, and it appears they were aware of the issue. A simple lack of prioritization explains why it was not fixed earlier. They seem knowledgeable about the topic and promised a fix in PivotX 2.1.0.]

Comments

darul wrote: Ah c'est plus fort que toi, chercher la faille dans ton propre outil d'hébergement, si le FBI parle de toi un jour je serai pas étonné :)

J'ai même lu le topic sur le forum, c'est quoi l'histoire du "salt" ça consiste en quoi ?
13 May 2010 17:14 UTC

mrb wrote: A password is hashed with a piece of random data, the salt, to produce a hash so that when reusing the same password on another system/account, it does not always produce the same hash.

It is a simple mechanism to make it virtually impossible to construct databases mapping hashes to passwords, because such databases would have to be built for every possible salt values. If the salt is large enough, the computational effort to do so is too large.

That's about as simple as I can make the explanation :-)
14 May 2010 04:37 UTC

cz wrote: I think you have a spam problem. 26 Aug 2010 04:13 UTC