CVE-2024-3183
Description
A vulnerability was found in FreeIPA in a way when a Kerberos TGS-REQ is encrypted using the client’s session key. This key is different for each new session, which protects it from brute force attacks. However, the ticket it contains is encrypted using the target principal key directly. For user principals, this key is a hash of a public per-principal randomly-generated salt and the user’s password.
If a principal is compromised it means the attacker would be able to retrieve tickets encrypted to any principal, all of them being encrypted by their own key directly. By taking these tickets and salts offline, the attacker could run brute force attacks to find character strings able to decrypt tickets when combined to a principal salt (i.e. find the principal’s password).
Statement
This kind of attacks primarily affect user principals, not service principals because their keys are usually generated randomly. But weak user passwords are particularly vulnerable to such attacks, especially if they are referenced in password dictionaries.
Mitigation
To mitigate this vulnerability, ticket requests to user principals are now disallowed in FreeIPA realms by default. This will keep attackers from obtaining data encrypted with the user key directly.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 8.1 | 8.1 | 8.1 |
| Attack Vector | Network | Network | Network |
| Attack Complexity | Low | Low | Low |
| Privileges Required | Low | Low | Low |
| User Interaction | None | None | None |
| Scope | Unchanged | Unchanged | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | High | High | High |
| Integrity Impact | High | High | High |
| Availability Impact | None | None | None |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Access Control
Technical Impact: Bypass Protection Mechanism; Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
If an attacker can gain access to the hashes, then the lack of sufficient computational effort will make it easier to conduct brute force attacks using techniques such as rainbow tables, or specialized hardware such as GPUs, which can be much faster than general-purpose CPUs for computing hashes.
Acknowledgements
Red Hat would like to thank Mikhail Sukhov for reporting this issue.
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