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Defect #3351

closed

Weak autologin token generation algorithm causes duplicate tokens

Added by Alexander Pavlov almost 15 years ago. Updated almost 15 years ago.

Status:
Closed
Priority:
Urgent
Assignee:
-
Category:
Accounts / authentication
Target version:
Start date:
2009-05-13
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Resolution:
Fixed
Affected version:

Description

After switching to mod_passenger we got 7 (seven!) duplicated autologin tokens within 2 weeks. It caused some changes have been made under wrong user account!

Looks like due to using of pseudo-random sequence generator two concurrent Ruby processes may use the same random seed (and as result the same random sequence).

At our instance we made quick fix - prepend random sequence with "#{user.id}_" and substring left 40 chars, however, I guess there may be better solution.

Actions #1

Updated by Alexander Pavlov almost 15 years ago

Also, I suggest to deny login if search by autologin within Token table returned 2 or more records - it allows to prevent and troubleshot possible errors in future.

Actions #2

Updated by Jean-Philippe Lang almost 15 years ago

  • Status changed from New to Resolved
  • Target version set to 0.8.4
  • Resolution set to Fixed
I never experienced this issue but I've just committed the following fixes in r2740, r2741, r2742:
  • ActiveSupport::SecureRandom is now used to generate tokens
  • Added a validation on token uniqueness that will prevent 2 tokens with the same value from being saved
  • Autologin is denied if more than one token is found
Actions #3

Updated by Alexander Pavlov almost 15 years ago

I never experienced

We suspect it is due to process forking which leads to random sequence seed inherited from parent process so two processes continue working with the same sequence.

ActiveSupport::SecureRandom is now used to generate tokens

Thanks, it is what we were going to suggest!

Actions #4

Updated by Alexander Pavlov almost 15 years ago

Small example from our developers

irb(main):004:0> rand(50)
=> 9
irb(main):005:0> fork { puts rand(50) }
37
=> 22831
irb(main):006:0> rand 50
=> 37
Actions #5

Updated by Alexander Pavlov almost 15 years ago

Also, you could check your DB to ensure you have really never affected by this vulnerability

select value, count(*) from tokens group by value having count(*) > 1
Actions #6

Updated by Jean-Philippe Lang almost 15 years ago

That's what I did when I said that I never experienced this issue.

Actions #7

Updated by Alexander Pavlov almost 15 years ago

Jean-Philippe Lang wrote:

That's what I did when I said that I never experienced this issue.

Probably you are not using mod_passenger. If you started several predefined processes (without mod_passenger) then random sequence had their own seeds and their own random sequences.

mod_passenger do forks and these inherit parent seed (see post #4) - it is key factor to reproduce problem.

Actions #8

Updated by Jean-Philippe Lang almost 15 years ago

  • Status changed from Resolved to Closed

Indeed, I'm using apache+mod_fcgid.
Fixes are backported in 0.8-stable branch in r2747.

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