Pro Hack - Cisco Type 4 Passwords cracked-Coding mistake endangers devices

Pro Hack - Cisco Type 4 Passwords cracked–Coding mistake endangers devices

In This Issue...

Cisco Type 4 Passwords cracked–Coding mistake endangers devices
More Recent Articles
Search Pro Hack

Cisco has issued a security advisory intimating that its new password hashing algorithm TYPE 4 is vulnerable,which allows Cisco TYPE 4 encoded hashes to be cracked easily. TYPE 4 is an update of TYPE 5 , and was supposed to salt passwords and apply 1000 iterations of SHA-256 . Well, engineers at Cisco actually miscoded the algorithm by forgetting to salt passwords and setting the number of iterations to 1 which makes it even weaker than TYPE 5 algorithm .

"This approach causes a Type 4 password to be less resilient to brute-force attacks than a Type 5 password of equivalent complexity."

Also, the code base (CISCO IOS 15) also disables TYPE 5 encryption on devices. Well..talk about rubbing salt on wounds.

Cisco Type 4 Passwords cracked–Coding misfire endangers hardware - - TheProhack.com

As per advisory -

"A device running a Cisco IOS or IOS XE release with support for Type 4 passwords lost the capability to create a Type 5 password from a user-provided plaintext password.Backward compatibility problems may arise when downgrading from a device running a Cisco IOS or IOS XE release with Type 4 password support and Type 4 passwords configured to a Cisco IOS or Cisco IOS XE release that does not support Type 4 passwords. Depending on the specific device configuration, the administrator may not be able to log in to the device or to change into privileged EXEC mode, requiring a password recovery process to be performed."

It was meant to be discovered inevitably. Folks at Hashcat - Philipp Schmidt and Jens Steube found it and were able to decode a hash posted at inetpro.org . Since hashes were weak, the information was more than enough to crack millions of hashes in hours if anyone gets their hands on hashes.

The aftermath ? Cisco says it will be creating new password type to counter it with new as of now unknown commands to implement it. In the meantime, Cisco says you "may" want to replace Type 4 password with Type 5 , as quoted -

There are two options to generate a Type 5 password:

Using another device running a Cisco IOS or Cisco IOS XE release without Type 4 support

Using the openssl command-line tool (part of the OpenSSL Project)

You can read the advisory here

You might also want to read -

• Email to a friend • Article Search • View comments • Track comments •

Pro Hack - CARNA Botnet-Researcher maps Internet using botnet

Pro Hack - CARNA Botnet–Researcher maps Internet using botnet

In This Issue...

CARNA Botnet–Researcher maps Internet using botnet
More Recent Articles
Search Pro Hack

" Incredible"

thats one word when you describe CARNA botnet, which is a single handed attempt to map the entire Internet by a researcher, which makes it a single most herculean feat I have witnessed in digital domain which both grips me with mixed feelings of astonishment and Deja Vu.

CARNA Botnet–Researchers map Internet - theprohack.com

As the paper states, the basic theory behind CARNA was

After completing the scan of roughly one hundred thousand IP addresses, we realized the number of insecure devices must be at least one hundred thousand. Starting with one device and assuming a scan speed of ten IP addresses per second, it should find the next open device within one hour. The scan rate would be doubled if we deployed a scanner to the newly found device. After doubling the scan rate in this way about 16.5 times, all unprotected devices would be found; this would take only 16.5 hours. Additionally, with one hundred thousand devices scanning at ten probes per second we would have a distributed port scanner to port scan the entire IPv4 Internet within one hour.

Impressive.. and the payload they devised was small, surgical and targeted routers with insecure logins.

The binary on the router was written in plain C. It was compiled for 9 different architectures using the OpenWRT Buildroot. In its latest and largest version this binary was between 46 and 60 kb in size depending on the target architecture.

Well, the end results ? ~ 420,000 infected routers are identified with 1,300,000,000 geolocated IPV4 devices with about one-third of those responding directly to pings.

Incredible..as I earlier said. Sceptics will say that It can be a hoax, as its difficult to verify with a 586GB bittorrent file compressed with ZPAQ which will decompress to 9TB , it needs somewhat of super human effort to download, unpack and analyze data if it really exists. But again, if its true, Its .. its awesome.

You can