CWE-257: Storing Passwords in a Recoverable Format
Official CWE-257 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-257: Storing Passwords in a Recoverable Format
Storing Passwords in a Recoverable Format represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality,Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity: User's passwords may be revealed.
- Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity: Revealed passwords may be reused elsewhere to impersonate the users in question.
Developer Pattern
CWE-257 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-257, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-257: Storing Passwords in a Recoverable Format
The storage of passwords in a recoverable format makes them subject to password reuse attacks by malicious users. In fact, it should be noted that recoverable encrypted passwords provide no significant benefit over plaintext passwords since they are subject not only to reuse by malicious attackers but also by malicious insiders. If a system administrator can recover a password directly, or use a brute force search on the available information, the administrator can use the password on other accounts.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Both of these examples verify a password by comparing it to a stored compressed version. Because a compression algorithm is used instead of a one way hashing algorithm, an attacker can recover compressed passwords stored in the database.
- The following examples show a portion of properties and configuration files for Java and ASP.NET applications. The files include username and password information but they are stored in cleartext. This Java example shows a properties file with a cleartext username / password pair.,The following example shows a portion of a configuration file for an ASP.Net application. This configuration file includes username and password information for a connection to a database but the pair is stored in cleartext.,Username and password information should not be included in a configuration file or a properties file in cleartext as this will allow anyone who can read the file access to the resource. If possible, encrypt this information.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use strong, non-reversible encryption to protect stored passwords.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.