RE: username and Password sent as clear text strings

["Shenk, Jerry A" <jshenk () decommunications com>]

That's certainly not ideal but it seems pretty common.  The whole idea
of SSL is to encrypt the traffic en-route so that makes it all ok,
right;)  The whole burden rests on doing SSL right and never having the
user click ok on one of those boxes about the SSL hostname not matching.
So, obviously it's a big deal if the ssl certificate is valid so they
aren't training user to ignore those warnings.  One other thing to check
is that SSL is actually required.  What happens if you go to the login
page and manually switch it back to http - does it let you go?  It seems
like a lot of people kindof take that as an acceptable risk.  It depends
what is being encrypted...requiring an administrative account be used in
that manner seems to add quite a bit to the to the risk.  It needs to be
a business decision....I'd try to build a reasonable scenario that would
allow an attacker to gain access and then let the customer weigh the
value of the data and the likelihood that someone will be that
interested against the difficulty of the attack.

BTW, this sounds like a great point to throw in a little discussion
about how well the monitor their logs and how quickly they'd catch an
attack or even an attempted attack.


-----Original Message-----
From: listbounce () securityfocus com [mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com]
On Behalf Of jfvanmeter () comcast net
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 6:40 AM
To: pen-test () securityfocus com
Subject: username and Password sent as clear text strings

Hello everyone, and I know this might not be the most correct place to
post this questions, but I was hoping to get some feedback on what you
think the potential risk would be and how this this could be exploited.

I completed a security review of a web server, that creates a SSL
connection between the cleint and the server. Using WebScarab, I could
see that the username and password are sent as clear text strings. The
log in to the server requires a administrative account.

Do you think there is a large amount of risk, in sending the username
and password as a clear text string, since the pipe is encrypted? I was
thinking that a man-in-the-middle or sometype of session hijacking
attack  could allow the account to be compromised.

 I'm working on completing the report for my client and was hoping to
get some feedback from everyone so I could pose this to them correcly.

Thank you in advance --John

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