CWE-640Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password

Description

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

Common consequences

• Access Control→Bypass Protection Mechanism,Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
  Weak password recovery schemes completely undermine a strong password authentication scheme. An attacker could gain unauthorized access to the system by retrieving a legitimate user's authentication credentials.
• Availability→DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
  An attacker could deny service to legitimate system users by launching a brute force attack on the password recovery mechanism using user ids of legitimate users.
• Integrity,Other→Other
  The system's security functionality is turned against the system by the attacker.

Potential mitigations

• Architecture and Design
  Make sure that all input supplied by the user to the password recovery mechanism is thoroughly filtered and validated.
• Architecture and Design
  Do not use standard weak security questions and use several security questions.
• Architecture and Design
  Make sure that there is throttling on the number of incorrect answers to a security question. Disable the password recovery functionality after a certain (small) number of incorrect guesses.
• Architecture and Design
  Require that the user properly answers the security question prior to resetting their password and sending the new password to the e-mail address of record.
• Architecture and Design
  Never allow the user to control what e-mail address the new password will be sent to in the password recovery mechanism.
• Architecture and Design
  Assign a new temporary password rather than revealing the original password.

Related CWEs

Recent CVEs classified under this CWE