Bouncy Castle crypto authentication bypass vulnerability revealed

guest · Dec 18, 2020

Bouncy Castle crypto authentication bypass vulnerability revealed
December 17, 2020
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...authentication-bypass-vulnerability-revealed/

A severe authentication bypass vulnerability has been reported in Bouncy Castle, a popular open-source cryptography library.
When exploited, the vulnerability (CVE-2020-28052) can allow an attacker to gain access to user or administrator accounts due to a cryptographic weakness in the way passwords are checked.

Bouncy Castle is a set of cryptography APIs used by both Java and C#/.NET developers building security applications who'd rather not worry about rolling their own cryptographic algorithms.
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Flawed password hashing algorithm
This week, two researchers Matti Varanka and Tero Rontti from Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center have disclosed an authentication bypass vulnerability in Bouncy Castle.

Successful exploitation of the flaw means, an attacker could brute-force the password for any user account, including the administrator's, should an application's hash-based password checks be using Bouncy Castle.
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High success rate on first 1,000 attempts
While strong passwords take a very long time to crack via brute-forcing, this implementation flaw "short circuits" the verification routine, letting this assumption slip.

On average, the researchers observed that 20% of tested passwords could be brute-forced on the first thousand attempts as a result of exploiting this vulnerability.
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Synopsis: CyRC analysis: Authentication bypass vulnerability in Bouncy Castle

CVE-2020-28052 is an authentication bypass vulnerability discovered in Bouncy Castle’s OpenBSDBcrypt class. It allows attackers to bypass password checks.
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guest · Dec 18, 2020

Bouncy Castle Bug Puts Bcrypt Passwords at Risk
December 18, 2020
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/bouncy-castle-bug-puts-bcrypt/

A high impact vulnerability has been discovered in a popular Java cryptography library which could allow attackers to more easily brute force Bcrypt hashed passwords.

“Some password hashes take more attempts, determined by how many bytes lie between 0 and 60 (1 to 59). Further, our investigation shows that all password hashes can be bypassed with enough attempts. In rare cases, some password hashes can be bypassed with any input.”
The flaw was disclosed to Bouncy Castle on October 20 and fixed in early November, with an advisory published yesterday.

However, 91% of organizations using the at-risk version of Bouncy Castle thus far haven’t patched, according to Sonatype.
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CTO Brian Fox claimed that the popular cryptographic Java library is used by developers across 26,000 organizations to secure their applications, and has been downloaded over 170 million times in the past 12 months alone.
This makes it a potentially serious supply chain risk.
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guest · Jul 24, 2021

Bouncy Castle and the Impact of Cryptographic Vulnerabilities
July 24, 2021
https://dzone.com/articles/bouncy-cast-impact-of-cryptographic-vulnerabilities

In December 2020, a vulnerability in the Bouncy Castle cryptographic library was publicly revealed. This vulnerability was discovered in October and fixed in November 2020. However, the nature of supply chain vulnerabilities means that many organizations remain vulnerable months later.
Impacts of the Bouncy Castle Vulnerability
Bouncy Castle is a popular cryptography API for Java and C#/.Net. It is one of the most well-known and widely used cryptographic libraries in existence. According to NuGet, over 16 million copies of the library have been downloaded by .Net users alone.

The vulnerability was detected over two months ago and patched over a month ago at the time of publication. However, it is highly likely that a high percentage of applications still use vulnerable versions of Bouncy Castle (versions 1.66 and below) and rely upon the vulnerable doCheckPassword() function for authentication.
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Minimizing Supply Chain Cryptographic Risk
When dealing with vulnerabilities embedded in third-party libraries, these issues can be difficult to detect and remediate if this responsibility lies with the organization.

The use of a Software as a Service (SaaS) encryption system can help to protect against and mitigate these types of vulnerabilities. By centralizing encryption functionality in a single system under the control of a third-party provider, an organization makes applying updates easier and the responsibility of its service provider. As a result, crucial updates, like the Bouncy Castle vulnerability patch will be applied more quickly and correctly.
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