oss-sec mailing list archives

Re: kwallet crypto misuse


From: George Staikos <staikos () kde org>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 03:59:01 -0500

This issue has been known for years but it seems kwallet is unmaintained. I
had to stop working on it before I could fix this,  among other issues.
Somebody should fix the crypto, yes, though I'm not sure how urgent an
issue this really is.
 On Jan 2, 2014 3:15 AM, "Florian Weimer" <fweimer () redhat com> wrote:

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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