CWE-759: Use of a One-Way Hash without a Salt | Glexia
CWE-759 (Use of a One-Way Hash without a Salt) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-759: Use of a One-Way Hash without a Salt
Use of a One-Way Hash without a Salt represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism,Gain Privileges or Assume Identity: If an attacker can gain access to the hashes, then the lack of a salt makes it easier to conduct brute force attacks using techniques such as rainbow tables.
Developer Pattern
CWE-759 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.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-759, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-759: Use of a One-Way Hash without a Salt
The product uses a one-way cryptographic hash against an input that should not be reversible, such as a password, but the product does not also use a salt as part of the input.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In both of these examples, a user is logged in if their given password matches a stored password: This code relies exclusively on a password mechanism (CWE-309) using only one factor of authentication (CWE-308). If an attacker can steal or guess a user's password, they are given full access to their account. Note this code also uses SHA-1, which is a weak hash (CWE-328). It also does not use a salt (CWE-759).
- In this example, a new user provides a new username and password to create an account. The program hashes the new user's password then stores it in a database. While it is good to avoid storing a cleartext password, the program does not provide a salt to the hashing function, thus increasing the chances of an attacker being able to reverse the hash and discover the original password if the database is compromised.,Fixing this is as simple as providing a salt to the hashing function on initialization:,Note that regardless of the usage of a salt, the md5 hash is no longer considered secure, so this example still exhibits CWE-327.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design:
- Architecture and Design: If a technique that requires extra computational effort can not be implemented, then for each password that is processed, generate a new random salt using a strong random number generator with unpredictable seeds. Add the salt to the plaintext password before hashing it. When storing the hash, also store the salt. Do not use the same salt for every password.
- Implementation,Architecture and Design: When using industry-approved techniques, use them correctly. Don't cut corners by skipping resource-intensive steps (CWE-325). These steps are often essential for preventing common attacks.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis - Binary or Bytecode:
- Manual Static Analysis - Binary or Bytecode:
- Manual Static Analysis - Source Code:
- Automated Static Analysis - Source Code:
- Automated Static Analysis:
- Architecture or Design Review:
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.