Research

Public disclosure date: 8/15/2011

Type of vulnerability: Weak Cryptography - Design Flaw

Exploit Vectors: Local

Vulnerability Description: A vulnerability exists in the NetSaro Enterprise Messenger Server application allowing an attacker to easily decrypt passwords used to authenticate to the application. The application implements Base64 encoding to obfuscate the values of plaintext passwords used for logging into the server administration console. This is a second level attack that requires access to the password files stored within the application root directory. An attacker who has previously compromised the host operating system or achieved direct access to the configuration.xml file found in the "NetSaro Enterprise Server" directory can obtain the encoded user credentials and decrypt them using readily available Base64 decoding tools. More information about this class of vulnerability can be obtained by visiting: Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm – CWE 327