Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: minor apache htpasswd problem


From: p () phk at
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 23:06:05 +0200

Hi,

I wrote about that to security () apache org in January. No response either.
Would be surprised if not a whole lot of other people noticed it as well.
A 2.0.x version I checked back then had the same problem iirc.


Thought they'd fix it at some point. 

Philipp Krammer



On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 10:25:05PM +0200, Andreas Steinmetz wrote:
This is valid for the htpasswd utility of at least apache 1.3.27 and 1.3.28:

The salt used for password generation solely depends on the current 
system time:

(void) srand((int) time((time_t *) NULL));
ap_to64(&salt[0], rand(), 8);

This causes all passwords generated within the same second to have the 
same salt value. This in turn may cause auto-generated default passwords 
to have the same value which could be a point of attack if the password 
file is not properly protected.

The apache team was notified on 23.08.2003 but didn't respond.

Though it would need quite some administrative errors before the above 
could be used it should still be corrected.
-- 
Andreas Steinmetz

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