CAPEC-50

Password Recovery Exploitation
Medium
High
Draft
2014-06-23
00h00 +00:00
2022-09-29
00h00 +00:00
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Descriptions CAPEC

An attacker may take advantage of the application feature to help users recover their forgotten passwords in order to gain access into the system with the same privileges as the original user. Generally password recovery schemes tend to be weak and insecure.

Informations CAPEC

Execution Flow

1) Explore

Understand the password recovery mechanism and how it works.

2) Exploit

Find a weakness in the password recovery mechanism and exploit it. For instance, a weakness may be that a standard single security question is used with an easy to determine answer.

Prerequisites

The system allows users to recover their passwords and gain access back into the system.
Password recovery mechanism has been designed or implemented insecurely.
Password recovery mechanism relies only on something the user knows and not something the user has.
No third party intervention is required to use the password recovery mechanism.

Skills Required

Brute force attack
Social engineering and more sophisticated technical attacks.

Resources Required

For a brute force attack one would need a machine with sufficient CPU, RAM and HD.

Mitigations

Use multiple security questions (e.g. have three and make the user answer two of them correctly). Let the user select their own security questions or provide them with choices of questions that are not generic.
E-mail the temporary password to the registered e-mail address of the user rather than letting the user reset the password online.
Ensure that your password recovery functionality is not vulnerable to an injection style attack.

Related Weaknesses

CWE-ID Weakness Name

CWE-522

 Insufficiently Protected Credentials
The product transmits or stores authentication credentials, but it uses an insecure method that is susceptible to unauthorized interception and/or retrieval.

CWE-640

 Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password
The product contains a mechanism for users to recover or change their passwords without knowing the original password, but the mechanism is weak.

References

REF-429

Advisory: Unauthorized password recovery in phpBannerExchange
http://www.redteam-pentesting.de/advisories/rt-sa-2006-005.txt

Submission

Name Organization Date Date release
CAPEC Content Team The MITRE Corporation 2014-06-23 +00:00

Modifications

Name Organization Date Comment
CAPEC Content Team The MITRE Corporation 2020-07-30 +00:00 Updated Example_Instances, Related_Attack_Patterns
CAPEC Content Team The MITRE Corporation 2020-12-17 +00:00 Updated Related_Attack_Patterns
CAPEC Content Team The MITRE Corporation 2021-06-24 +00:00 Updated Related_Weaknesses
CAPEC Content Team The MITRE Corporation 2022-02-22 +00:00 Updated Description, Extended_Description
CAPEC Content Team The MITRE Corporation 2022-09-29 +00:00 Updated Example_Instances