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Description
Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort vulnerability in danielberkompas cloak_ecto and danielberkompas cloak allows an attacker who holds the hashed values and the configured secret to brute-force low-entropy plaintexts much faster than configured.
The dump/1 callback that Cloak.Ecto.PBKDF2 (Cloak.Fields.PBKDF2 in cloak before the Ecto code moved to cloak_ecto) injects into a field module calls :pbkdf2.pbkdf2/4 with config[:size] in the iteration-count position. The :iterations setting is validated but never used. With the cloak_ecto defaults (iterations: 600_000, size: 32) each hash runs 32 PBKDF2 rounds instead of 600,000, so offline guessing of values such as email addresses costs about 18,750 times less than configured.
This issue affects cloak_ecto: from 1.0.0-alpha.0 onward; cloak: from 0.7.0 before 1.0.0-alpha.0.
Proof of concept
- Define a field module with
use Cloak.Ecto.PBKDF2and configure only a:secret, so that the defaultsiterations: 600_000andsize: 32apply. - Call
dump/1on a value. - Compare the result with
:pbkdf2.pbkdf2({:hmac, :sha256}, value, secret, 32)and with the same call at 600,000 rounds. It matches the 32-round hash, not the 600,000-round hash, and returns in microseconds instead of about one second.
Weaknesses & attack patterns
Weakness
CWE-916
·
Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort
in catalog →
MITRE ↗
Attack patterns
CAPEC-55
·
Rainbow Table Password Cracking
MITRE ↗
An attacker who obtains a database dump and the PBKDF2 secret can recover hashed values with low entropy, such as email addresses, by offline guessing at a cost far below what the configuration promises.
Affected — Hex / cloak_ecto Hex.pm ↗ Repository ↗
modules · source files
Affected — GitHub / danielberkompas/cloak_ecto Repository ↗
modules · source files
Affected — Hex / cloak Hex.pm ↗ Repository ↗
modules · source files
Affected — GitHub / danielberkompas/cloak Repository ↗
modules · source files
Workarounds
Override dump/1 in the field module that uses Cloak.Ecto.PBKDF2, so that it calls :pbkdf2.pbkdf2/5 with the configured :iterations and :size. Then recompute all stored hashes, because the existing values no longer match.
References
Credits
CVSS breakdown
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N