#KASPERSKY PASSWORD MANAGER FLAW GENERATED BRUTEFORCED HOW TO#
#KASPERSKY PASSWORD MANAGER FLAW GENERATED BRUTEFORCED GENERATOR#
#KASPERSKY PASSWORD MANAGER FLAW GENERATED BRUTEFORCED PASSWORD#

#KASPERSKY PASSWORD MANAGER FLAW GENERATED BRUTEFORCED PASSWORD#

Password crackers such as Hashcat or John the Ripper try to break first probable password, e.g. Our hypothesis is that method has been implemented to trick standard password cracking tools. But, after “h” is picked, its probability of appearance will then increase a lot. These changes also affect other letters: after “z” has been picked, the probability of “a”, “e”, “m”, “q”, “s” and “x” has also increased. Once the charset is ordered according to this table, “z” will be at the end of the table, and will have much less changes to be taken. If a “z” is generated, then the probability of appearance of “z” in the frequency table will be strongly increased. However, things are more complex: generated chars are taken into account in the computation of the frequencies of appearance.

If these stats were taken independently to generate every char of a password, we could see often several “q”, “x” or “z” in the passwords. Then, charset is ordered according to the inverse frequency of appearance of each letter: q, x, z, w… n, a, e.Īs lower values are more likely to appear given the distribution function, we can assume some chars like “q” and “x” are much more likely to appear in passwords generated by KPM. The supposed frequency of apparition of each letter, as used in KPM, is shown in the graph below:

Then, for the next chars, KPM relies on letter frequency: it assumes least frequent letters (in some language) should appear more often in the generated password.

For the first three chars, charset is fully ordered (almost… we will see that later).

How is created the charset? Is it fully ordered, like “abcdefghij…”? No… Such method is quite puzzling, but it seems it is exactly what KPM wanted to implement. The distribution of this function is not uniform: lower positions have more chances to occur than values near from 1. Internal ulong GetRandomUInt64 ( ulong uMa圎xcl ) dx \ Here is the main loop responsible for the password generation: The simpler method is the charset-base generator, which creates a password from a given charset. KeePass provides 3 methods to generate a password: a charset-based, a pattern-based and a custom generation method. Password generation is implemented in various classes in the namespace. Generating robust passwords from a charsetįor the sake of simplicity, let’s study how passwords are generated in KeePass, an open source project. Vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2020-27020. As we will see, passwords generated by this tool can be bruteforced in seconds.Īfter a bit less than two years, this vulnerability has been patched on all versions of KPM.

We will first see an example of a good password generation method, to explain after why the method used by Kaspersky was flawed, and how we exploited it. To generate secure passwords, Kaspersky Password Manager must rely on a secure password generation mechanism. One key point with password managers is that, contrary to humans, these tools are good to generate random, strong passwords.

The main functionality of KPM is password management. Product is available for various operating systems (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Web…) Encrypted data can then be automatically synchronized between all your devices, always protected by your master password. This vault is protected with a master password, so, as with other password managers, users have to remember a single password to use and manage all their passwords. Kaspersky Password Manager is a product that securely stores passwords and documents into an encrypted vault, protected by a password. Two years ago, we looked at Kaspersky Password Manager (KPM), a password manager developed by Kaspersky. The product has been updated and its newest versions aren’t affected by this issue.

It also provides a proof of concept to test if your version is vulnerable.

#KASPERSKY PASSWORD MANAGER FLAW GENERATED BRUTEFORCED HOW TO#

This article explains how to securely generate passwords, why Kaspersky Password Manager failed, and how to exploit this flaw. All the passwords it created could be bruteforced in seconds. Its single source of entropy was the current time. The most critical one is that it used a PRNG not suited for cryptographic purposes.

#KASPERSKY PASSWORD MANAGER FLAW GENERATED BRUTEFORCED GENERATOR#

The password generator included in Kaspersky Password Manager had several problems.

Kaspersky password manager flaw generated bruteforced