RE: Penetration Test: TACACS

["Andrew van der Stock" <ajv () e-secure com au>]

Database password management is one of the all time worst offenders. Often
DSN names and sa/password combos are to be found in the clear all over the
place. One review I did had them in an .inc file, which was retrievable
using a normal browser.

So, it's not unusual to find bad password handling in security products.
Other places/products to be cautious of like this:

* VNC on NT (its in the registry, and can be easily retrieved from NT 4.0
hosts)
* VNC in general (it stores the password in 3des with the same salt for all
instances)
* DSN names in NT/2K are often fully specified, sometimes even in URLs or
hidden fields
* database connectors in general
* global.asa for IIS
* database rows (if you know the product's schema)
* Checkpoint's Session Authentication agent is a joke

And so on...

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: padrino () hushmail com [mailto:padrino () hushmail com]
Sent: Friday, 22 June 2001 01:07
To: pen-test () securityfocus com
Subject: Penetration Test: TACACS


Greetings...

Recently while performing a penetration test of a large client
I was able to gain access to the Solaris server that runs the
Cisco Tacacs Authentication Server...

After perusing the system for a while I realized that the Java/JDBC
client program for administering the TACACS Database
read a config file that had the DB username/password in clear
text.   Using a little experience with PERL ODBC I connected to
the Database server and grabbed the data from tables:
cs_user_profile, cs_password, cs_privilege.  My client
used Clear as the password type.

Is this normal?  Seems to me like one of the core things you
try to protect on a WAN are Router passwords... Should Tacacs
allow you to store in password inside the database in cleartext?

Don't know if this is something big or if I've merely had too much
coffee...  Someone please let me know if I've been smoking too much
caffeine!

Thanks in advance,
el padrino

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