CWE-261: Weak Encoding for Password
Description
Obscuring a password with a trivial encoding does not protect the password.
Submission Date :
July 19, 2006, midnight
Modification Date :
2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00
Organization :
MITRE
Extended Description
Password management issues occur when a password is stored in plaintext in an application's properties or configuration file. A programmer can attempt to remedy the password management problem by obscuring the password with an encoding function, such as base 64 encoding, but this effort does not adequately protect the password.
Example - 1
The following code reads a password from the registry and uses the password to create a new network credential.
...string value = regKey.GetValue(passKey).ToString();byte[] decVal = Convert.FromBase64String(value);NetworkCredential netCred = newNetworkCredential(username,decVal.toString(),domain);...This code will run successfully, but anyone who has access to the registry key used to store the password can read the value of password. If a devious employee has access to this information, they can use it to break into the system.
Example - 2
The following code reads a password from a properties file and uses the password to connect to a database.
...Properties prop = new Properties();prop.load(new FileInputStream("config.properties"));String password = Base64.decode(prop.getProperty("password"));DriverManager.getConnection(url, usr, password);...This code will run successfully, but anyone with access to config.properties can read the value of password and easily determine that the value has been base 64 encoded. If a devious employee has access to this information, they can use it to break into the system.
Related Weaknesses
This table shows the weaknesses and high level categories that are related to this weakness. These relationships are defined to give an overview of the different insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction.
Visit http://cwe.mitre.org/ for more details.