pam password hashes aren't compared case-sensitive

2013.12.10
Credit: Ratul
Risk: High
Local: No
Remote: Yes
CWE: N/A


CVSS Base Score: 4.3/10
Impact Subscore: 2.9/10
Exploitability Subscore: 8.6/10
Exploit range: Remote
Attack complexity: Medium
Authentication: No required
Confidentiality impact: Partial
Integrity impact: None
Availability impact: None

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1038555 It was found that in pam_userdb module for Pam, password hashes weren't compared case-sensitively, which could lead to acceptance of hashes for completely different passwords, which shouldn't be accepted. After hashing the user's password with crypt(), pam_userdb compares the result to the stored hash case-insensitively with strncasecmp(), which should be avoided, as it could result in an increased possibility of a successful brute-force attack.

References:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1038555
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=731368


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