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.
This makes it easier for attackers to pre-compute the hash value using dictionary attack techniques such as rainbow tables. It should be noted that, despite common perceptions, the use of a good salt with a hash does not sufficiently increase the effort for an attacker who is targeting an individual password, or who has a large amount of computing resources available, such as with cloud-based services or specialized, inexpensive hardware. Offline password cracking can still be effective if the hash function is not expensive to compute; many cryptographic functions are designed to be efficient and can be vulnerable to attacks using massive computing resources, even if the hash is cryptographically strong. The use of a salt only slightly increases the computing requirements for an attacker compared to other strategies such as adaptive hash functions. See CWE-916 for more details.
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: Use an adaptive hash function that can be configured to change the amount of computational effort needed to compute the hash, such as the number of iterations ("stretching") or the amount of memory required. Some hash functions perform salting automatically. These functions can significantly increase the overhead for a brute force attack compared to intentionally-fast functions such as MD5. For example, rainbow table attacks can become infeasible due to the high computing overhead. Finally, since computing power gets faster and cheaper over time, the technique can be reconfigured to increase the workload without forcing an entire replacement of the algorithm in use. Some hash functions that have one or more of these desired properties include bcrypt [REF-291], scrypt [REF-292], and PBKDF2 [REF-293]. While there is active debate about which of these is the most effective, they are all stronger than using salts with hash functions with very little computing overhead. Note that using these functions can have an impact on performance, so they require special consideration to avoid denial-of-service attacks. However, their configurability provides finer control over how much CPU and memory is used, so it could be adjusted to suit the environment's needs.
- 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: According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: Cost effective for partial coverage: Bytecode Weakness Analysis - including disassembler + source code weakness analysis Binary Weakness Analysis - including disassembler + source code weakness analysis
- Manual Static Analysis - Binary or Bytecode: According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: Cost effective for partial coverage: Binary / Bytecode disassembler - then use manual analysis for vulnerabilities & anomalies
- Manual Static Analysis - Source Code: According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: Highly cost effective: Focused Manual Spotcheck - Focused manual analysis of source Manual Source Code Review (not inspections)
- Automated Static Analysis - Source Code: According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: Highly cost effective: Source code Weakness Analyzer Context-configured Source Code Weakness Analyzer
- Automated Static Analysis: According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: Cost effective for partial coverage: Configuration Checker
- Architecture or Design Review: According to SOAR [REF-1479], the following detection techniques may be useful: Highly cost effective: Formal Methods / Correct-By-Construction Cost effective for partial coverage: Inspection (IEEE 1028 standard) (can apply to requirements, design, source code, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.