oss-sec mailing list archives

kwallet crypto misuse


From: Florian Weimer <fweimer () redhat com>
Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2014 09:15:15 +0100

I just noticed this is now public:

<http://gaganpreet.in/blog/2013/07/24/kwallet-security-analysis/>

Short summary: kwallet uses Blowfish to encrypt its password store, and despite an attempt at implementing CBC mode (in a file called cbc.cc no less), it's actually ECB mode. UTF-16 encoding combined with Blowfish's 64 bit block size means there are just four password characters per block. Encryption is convergent as well. This may enable recovery of passwords through codebook attacks.

Should we treat this as a minor vulnerability?

--
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team


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