basic authentication vulnerability owasp

A list of the top 10 assaults for various technologies, including web applications, the cloud, mobile security, etc., has been compiled by OWASP under the moniker OWASP . Want to track your progress and have a more personalized learning experience? Authentication is the process of verifying that someone is who they say they are. Authentication is the process of verifying the identity of a given user or client. The request is intercepted by Burpsuite and looks something like this. Unfortunately, the Official ZAP Jenkins plugin was giving me issues with the httpsender script. This post is for intermediate users who already know how ZAP works and novice programming skill is required. This should be done on every request, and a challenge-response Authorization mechanism added to sensitive resources like password changes, primary contact details such as email, physical address, payment or delivery instructions. Record your progression from Apprentice to Expert. Rapid7's VulnDB is curated repository of vetted computer software exploits and exploitable vulnerabilities. What is vulnerability Owasp? Finally, we'll provide some basic guidance on how you can ensure that your own authentication mechanisms are as robust as possible. Attackers can detect broken authentication using manual means and exploit them using automated tools with password lists and dictionary attacks. Once an attacker has either bypassed authentication or has brute-forced their way into another user's account, they have access to all the data and functionality that the compromised account has. Automating Authenticated API vulnerability scanning with OWASP ZAP Performing authenticated application vulnerability scanning can get quite complex for modern applications or APIs. Rule: Ensure Virus Scanning technology is regularly updated with the latest virus definitions/rules. Scale dynamic scanning. SOAP encoding styles are meant to move data between software objects into XML format and back again. However, I must admit ZAP has a steep learning curve but once you get over that hurdle you will love ZAP. Hackazon provides vulnerable APIs which we will use for this demo. Authorization: Token af538baa9045a84c0e889f672baf83ff24, You can find more information about the REST API here: https://github.com/rapid7/hackazon/blob/master/REST.md. Email remains essential for sales, productivity, and confidential communication in business, and using Basic Authentication puts companies at greater risk of data breaches and disruption of email. The impact of authentication vulnerabilities can be very severe. To help you with this process, we've provided a shortlist of candidate usernames and passwords that you should use to solve the labs. Accelerate penetration testing - find more bugs, more quickly. The authentication mechanisms are weak because they fail to adequately protect against brute-force attacks. Information on ordering, pricing, and more. Customers that have disabled Basic Authentication have experienced 67 percent fewer compromises than those who still use it. Using this vulnerability, an attacker can gain control over user accounts in a system. SOAP provides the ability to attach files and documents to SOAP messages. Enhance security monitoring to comply with confidence. First, lets analyse our target and take a look at how the authentication works for Hackazon API. Conceptually at least, authentication vulnerabilities are some of the simplest issues to understand. User authentication verifies the identity of the user or the system trying to connect to the service. We have also worked with partners to help our mutual customers turn off Basic Authentication and implement Modern Authentication. Rule: Configuration should be optimized for maximum message throughput to avoid running into DoS-like situations. ZAP custom script for authentication and proxy. Threat Intelligence. Validation against malformed XML entities. You can also use an app, such as Outlook mobile, that only uses Modern Authentication and works on both iOS and Android devices. Our own research found that more than 99 percent of password spray attacks leverage the presence of Basic Authentication. At least in part, websites are exposed to anyone who is connected to the internet by design. You can have only one token, so if you use it in several places, do not call basic authorization requests, do it only once, and then use received token. A user authenticating with basic authentication must provide a valid username and password. See how our software enables the world to secure the web. I included a python script which can automate the entire scanning process. Web services need to authorize web service clients the same way web applications authorize users. Even commercial vulnerability scanners struggle with this problem. As previously announced, we are turning off Basic Authentication in Exchange Online for all tenants starting October 1, 2022. Actions To Take Once Carlos123 is authenticated, his permissions determine whether or not he is authorized, for example, to access personal information about other users or perform actions such as deleting another user's account. Content validation for XML input should include: Web services need to ensure that the output sent to clients is encoded to be consumed as data and not as scripts. Impact If an attacker can intercept traffic on the network, he/she might be able to steal the user's credentials. Free, lightweight web application security scanning for CI/CD. Catch critical bugs; ship more secure software, more quickly. Rule: Enforce the same encoding style between the client and the server. Copyright 2021 - CheatSheets Series Team - This work is licensed under a, Insecure Direct Object Reference Prevention, Cross Site Scripting Prevention Cheat Sheet, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. NOTE: Before you add a vulnerability, please search and make sure there isn't an equivalent one already. So the web service must provide the following validation: Rule: Validation against recursive payloads. You can download the vulnerable docker image of the Hackazon application and the scripts we will use in this tutorial here. Securing email has never been more critical. Rule: All communication with and between web services containing sensitive features, an authenticated session, or transfer of sensitive data must be encrypted using well-configured TLS. Your tenant admin should check the Microsoft 365 Message Center often, as usage data is sent regularly to all tenants still using Basic Authentication. This is for data at rest. Vulnerabilities in multi-factor authentication, Vulnerabilities in other authentication mechanisms, How to secure your authentication mechanisms. You may want to consider creating a redirect if the topic is the same. The integrity of data in transit can easily be provided by TLS. We recommend our customers turn off Basic Authentication and implement Modern Authentication now. Rule: Like any web application, web services need to validate input before consuming it. Rule: If used, Basic Authentication must be conducted over TLS, but Basic Authentication is not recommended because it discloses secrets in plan text (base64 encoded) in HTTP Headers. Rule: For XML data, use XML digital signatures to provide message integrity using the sender's private key. Authentication in the context of web applications is commonly performed by submitting a username or ID and one or more items of private information that only a given user should know. Get started with Burp Suite Professional. Often, certain high-severity attacks will not be possible from publicly accessible pages, but they may be possible from an internal page. It is a key part of security for any website or application. Therefore, robust authentication mechanisms are an integral aspect of effective web security. Web services like web applications could be a target for DOS attacks by automatically sending the web services thousands of large size SOAP messages. Consider the following security flaws: Basic authentication sends the username and password across the network in a form that can trivially be decoded. The service consumer should verify the server certificate is issued by a trusted provider, is not expired, is not revoked, matches the domain name of the service, and that the server has proven that it has the private key associated with the public key certificate (by properly signing something or successfully decrypting something encrypted with the associated public key). Step 1: Authorization: Basic dGVzdF91c2VyOjEyMzQ1Ng== On every basic authorization request without _token parameter new token will be generated. For the same reason, encryption does not ensure the identity of the sender. Logic flaws or poor coding in the implementation allow the authentication mechanisms to be bypassed entirely by an attacker. Rule: Limit the amount of CPU cycles the web service can use based on expected service rate, in order to have a stable system. If you love to hack authentication mechanisms, after completing our main authentication labs, more advanced users may want to try and tackle our OAuth authentication labs. Everyone tries to do it differently. For example in this Hackazon API case, you need to do basic authentication, obtain a token and pass this token on your request header on each request to access the authenticated resource. This gets pretty important when web service clients use the output to render HTML pages either directly or indirectly using AJAX objects. Allowing Domains or Accounts to Expire; Buffer Overflow; Business logic vulnerability . There are 921 password attacks every second, almost doubling the frequency of attacks from 2021. However, they can be among the most critical due to the obvious relationship between authentication and security. To reduce the risk of such attacks on your own websites, there are several general principles that you should always try to follow. We will use script based authentication for this post. Practise exploiting vulnerabilities on realistic targets. . Rule: A web service should authorize its clients whether they have access to the method in question. To explain Excessive Data Exposure, I would like to share with you a story about Ron. Reduce risk. However, authentication can be broken if it is not implemented correctly. To set up the vulnerability scan settings will take the following steps: 3. Microsoft retires Basic Authentication in Exchange Online. Ideally, any administrative capabilities would be in an application that is completely separate from the web services being managed by these capabilities, thus completely separating normal users from these sensitive functions. One of the best functionality in ZAP is its scripting capabilities. 2021. Read the latest updates from the Exchange Online team. As more sophisticated cyber criminals take aim at hybrid and remote workers, Microsoft is working to raise awareness among Exchange Online customers that one of the most important security steps they can take is to move away from outdated, less secure protocols, like Basic Authentication. We will look more closely at some of the most common vulnerabilities in the following areas: Note that several of the labs require you to enumerate usernames and brute-force passwords. Hence we use a global variable (hackazon_token) and pass this variable to http_sender script which intercepts all requests (including from Active scan, Spidering, etc) and add this token to those requests. Basic authentication sends username and password in plain text. Move all of your directories which require authentication to be served only over HTTPS, and disable any access to these pages over HTTP. User authentication verifies the identity of the user or the system trying to connect to the service. In effect, the secret password is sent in the clear, for anyone to read and capture. This post will focus on API testing but the scripting knowledge will be similar to web applications. The enterprise-enabled dynamic web vulnerability scanner. The reality is that updating your apps and configuration to use Modern Authentication makes your business more secure against many threats. Generally, using basic authentication is not a good solution. Therefore, in order to introduce the concept of a session, it is required to implement session management capabilities that link both the authentication and access control (or . Rule: Validating against overlong element names. The world's #1 web penetration testing toolkit. November 3, 2022. I hope you found this tutorial useful. Since we announced our intent to deprecate Basic Authentication in 2019, we have helped millions of Exchange Online users move to Modern Authentication. Broken Authentication is the second most critical vulnerability as per OWASP Top 10 list. By using this website you agree with our use of cookies to improve its performance and enhance your experience. You can write your own scripts in python, JavaScript, ZEST or Ruby. Download the latest version of Burp Suite. The user account can be a local account or a domain account. List of Vulnerabilities. To protect your APIs (or gym bags) you must make sure your developers implement a strong authentication "lock" that follows the recent standards, such as the OWASP authentication cheat sheet. The httpsender script on the jenkins setup doesn't seem to change request headers as it does on the UI or python script. You can search and find all vulnerabilities, CVSS:3.0/AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N, Bash Command Injection Vulnerability (Shellshock Bug), Remote Code Execution and DoS in HTTP.sys (IIS), Using Content Security Policy to Secure Web Applications. A vulnerability is a hole or a weakness in the application, which can be a design flaw or an implementation bug, that allows an attacker to cause harm to the stakeholders of an application.Stakeholders include the application owner, application users, and other entities that rely on the application. Rule: Web services must validate SOAP payloads against their associated XML schema definition (XSD). This protection should be provided by your XML parser/schema validator. Due to malfunctioning or while under attack, a web service may required too much resources, leaving the host system unstable. In this section, we'll look at some of the most common authentication mechanisms used by websites and discuss potential vulnerabilities in them. Then just send this token in every request in Authorization header or as a request parameter Token. Authentication bypass vulnerability could allow attackers to perform various malicious operations by bypassing the device authentication mechanism. Rule: The XSD defined for a SOAP web service should, at a minimum, define the maximum length and character set of every parameter allowed to pass into and out of the web service. Such authentication is usually a function of the container of the web service. Rule: Messages containing sensitive data that must remain encrypted at rest after receipt must be encrypted with strong data encryption, not just transport encryption. XML Denial of Service is probably the most serious attack against web services. Broadly speaking, most vulnerabilities in authentication mechanisms arise in one of two ways: In many areas of web development, logic flaws will simply cause the website to behave unexpectedly, which may or may not be a security issue. Home / Vulnerabilities / High / Basic Authorization over HTTP. Help people and teams do their best work with the apps and experiences they rely on every day to connect, collaborate, and get work done from anywhere. A website's authentication system usually consists of several distinct mechanisms where vulnerabilities may occur. The problem gets worse if you want to integrate with your CICD pipeline. Basic authentication sends username and password in plain text. This will increase the performance of the scan significantly and help with false positives. There are a few issues with HTTP Basic Auth: The password is sent over the wire in base64 encoding (which can be easily converted to plaintext). As well as potentially allowing attackers direct access to sensitive data and functionality, they also expose additional attack surface for further exploits. In the worst case, it could help them gain complete control over . (It's free!). What's the difference between Pro and Enterprise Edition? For our case, we just need the authentication url. Dead accurate, fast & easy-to-use Web Application Security Scanner, Invicti Security Corp 1000 N Lamar Blvd Suite 300 Austin, TX 78703, US. Many mobile devices still use Basic Authentication, so making sure your device is using the latest software or operating system update is one of the ways to switch it to use Modern Authentication. The important sections of the context are structure, authentication, technology and user. More information in our Privacy Policy. Hence we need to go through this painful process of writing custom authentication and httpsender scripts. The server responds back with a "Authorization Required . Please notice that due to the difference in implementation between different frameworks, this cheat sheet is kept at a high level. During regular operation, web services require computational power such as CPU cycles and memory. Few claps never hurt anybody . We'll highlight both inherent vulnerabilities in different authentication mechanisms, as well as some typical vulnerabilities that are introduced by their improper implementation. This is sometimes referred to as "broken authentication". In other words, it involves making sure that they really are who they claim to be. This article is focused on providing guidance for securing web services and preventing web services related attacks. Transport confidentiality protects against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks against web service communications to/from the server. Data elements meant to be kept confidential must be encrypted using a strong encryption cipher with an adequate key length to deter brute-forcing. Although the name only refers to security for web apps, OWASP's focus is not just on web applications. Authentication is the process of verifying that an individual, entity or website is whom it claims to be. As we use reCAPTCHA, you need to be able to access Google's servers to use this function. Rule: TLS must be used to authenticate the service provider to the service consumer. Following an authentication challenge, the web service should check the privileges of the requesting entity whether they have access to the requested resource. According to the OWASP Foundation, broken authentication is among the top ten web application security risks . This is recommended even if the messages themselves are encrypted because TLS provides numerous benefits beyond traffic confidentiality including integrity protection, replay defenses, and server authentication. Validating inputs using a strong allow list. www.faun.dev, Product Security | Sydney |https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanvirahmed11/, How to Change Your Career Even If You Think Its Too Late, Adventures in extracting parts of a tarball, High throughput object store access via file abstraction, [Issue&Solution] When we upgrading kube v1.16.12 > v1.17.17, https://github.com/rapid7/hackazon/blob/master/REST.md. When using public key cryptography, encryption does guarantee confidentiality but it does not guarantee integrity since the receiver's public key is public. Even if the account does not have access to any sensitive data, it might still allow the attacker to access additional pages, which provide a further attack surface. Insight Platform Solutions; XDR & SIEM. THREAT COMMAND. Feel free to provide any comment or feedback. Rule: Limit the amount of memory the web service can use to avoid system running out of memory. This credentials can be obtained from the authentication scripts as shown below. Rule: Client Certificate Authentication using Mutual-TLS is a common form of authentication that is recommended where appropriate. HTTP is a stateless protocol (RFC2616 section 5), where each request and response pair is independent of other web interactions. The best manual tools to start web security testing. ZAP script will extract the token and subsequent request to the endpoint will include this token as part of the request header. Attackers could also bypass the authentication mechanism by stealing the valid session IDs or cookies. Rule: Limit the number of simultaneous open files, network connections and started processes. The HTTP Basic Authentication scheme is not considered to be a secure method of user authentication (unless . Level up your hacking and earn more bug bounties. In some cases the host system may start killing processes to free up memory. For more information on how to do this properly see the Transport Layer Protection Cheat Sheet. For example, we only want to do injection test and also we know that the database is MySQL and hence would like to test MySQL related SQL injection payloads only. This either cripples the application making it unable to respond to legitimate messages or it could take it down entirely. Get help and advice from our experts on all things Burp. If you're already familiar with the basic concepts behind authentication vulnerabilities and just want to practice exploiting them on some realistic, deliberately vulnerable targets, you can access all of the labs in this topic from the link below. Rule: Protection against XML entity expansion. Authentication script does the first part which obtains the token. If you are working with SOAP-based Web Services, the element names are those SOAP Actions. Such authentication is usually a function of the container of the web service. Larger size limit (or no limit at all) increases the chances of a successful DoS attack. I included the context file (Hackazon_API_Context.context) file for this demo in the github repo above. We will need another httpsender script to add this token to each subsequent requests. The messages contain links to useful Microsoft Docs, such as Deprecation of Basic Authentication in Exchange Online, which explain how to identify and remediate Basic Authentication usage. Rule: Validation against oversized payloads. Login here. Every vulnerability article has a defined structure. See the OWASP Authentication Cheat Sheet. The authentication script will be tied with the context defined earlier. (Larger attack window) The password is cached by the webbrowser, at a minimum for the length of the window / process. Basic authentication is vulnerable to replay attacks. ZAP provides authentication mechanism for basic use cases, for example: form based authentication, etc. See: Authentication Cheat Sheet. Even compromising a low-privileged account might still grant an attacker access to data that they otherwise shouldn't have, such as commercially sensitive business information. But authentication is not one size fits all. Rule: Messages containing sensitive data must be encrypted using a strong encryption cipher. Similarly user credentials, api keys,etc can be passed to the script from users menu on the context screen. The problem gets worse if you want to integrate with your CICD pipeline. In this post we will explore how we can handle complex authentication using this scripting functionality. Deprecation of Basic Authentication in Exchange Online, Internet Crime Report 2021, Internet Crime Complaint Center. Sorted by: 355. This is particularly beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses that dont have dedicated security staff. Authentication is the process of verifying that a user really is who they claim to be, whereas authorization involves verifying whether a user is allowed to do something. Because basic authentication does not encrypt user credentials, it is important that traffic always be sent over an encrypted SSL session. In simple words the API Gateway throttling takes all API requests from a client, determines which services are needed, and combines them into a unified, seamless . Invicti identified that the application is using basic authentication over HTTP. Get your questions answered in the User Forum. In this post, we will take the demo vulnerable application Hackazon. First, you have to make a usual Basic-Authorization request, and in response you will receive the token. Products. Now we need to use this token for each subsequent requests. API #3 - Excessive Data Exposure. Moving your Exchange Online organization from Basic Authentication to the more secure OAuth 2.0 token-based authentication (or Modern Authentication) enables stronger protection and the ability to use features like multifactor authentication (MFA). For this reason, learning how to identify and exploit authentication vulnerabilities, including how to bypass common protection measures, is a fundamental skill. Schema validation enforces constraints and syntax defined by the schema. A web service needs to make sure a web service client is authorized to perform a certain action (coarse-grained) on the requested data (fine-grained). If they are able to compromise a high-privileged account, such as a system administrator, they could take full control over the entire application and potentially gain access to internal infrastructure. The same study found that over 97 percent of credential stuffing attacks also use legacy authentication. Bonus materials (Security book, Docker book, and other bonus files) are included in the Premium package! This gives the opportunity for hackers to attach viruses and malware to these SOAP messages. Rule: Ensure Virus Scanning technology is installed and preferably inline so files and attachments could be checked before being saved on disk. In addition, the FBIs Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 19,954 business email compromise (BEC) and email account compromise (EAC) complaints with adjusted losses at nearly USD2.4 billion.1. ZAP will first do basic authenticate to the /api/auth endpoint. There are three authentication factors into which different types of authentication can be categorized: Authentication mechanisms rely on a range of technologies to verify one or more of these factors. Write custom ZAP script for authentication and proxy. 1Internet Crime Report 2021, Internet Crime Complaint Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Rule: Ensure access to administration and management functions within the Web Service Application is limited to web service administrators. Logic flaws or poor coding in the implementation allow the authentication mechanisms to be bypassed entirely by an attacker. I wont go through this as the script is pretty self explanatory.

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basic authentication vulnerability owasp