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Out-of-Cycle Bulletin Fixes Serious ASP.NET Padding Oracle Vulnerability

The Editor

Summary:

Exposure:

At a cryptography conference in 2002, a researcher introduced a cryptological “side-channel” attack called a padding oracle attack, which attackers can leverage to decrypt Cipher Block Chaining or CBC-mode encryption without knowing the encryption key. Without getting into too much technical detail, block ciphers, like CBC, require that all messages arrive with the exact same number of blocks (multiples of eight bytes). However, the plain text messages you encrypt come in varying lengths, which may not fit perfectly within those specifically-sized boundaries. As a result, cryptographic algorithms have to use padding to fill in the extra, unused portions of each block. In order to check whether or not an encrypted value is padded correctly or not, encryption mechanisms employ something called a padding oracle. The researcher from 2002 found that by sending multiple, incorrectly padded messages to a server, he could interpret the error messages returned by the padding oracle to eventually learn enough to decrypt the server’s encrypted content without knowing the encryption key. The researcher even released a tool called Padding Oracle Exploit Tool (POET), which you can use to leverage this class of vulnerability.

More recently, at the Ekoparty security conference in Argentina, two security researchers reported that Microsoft ASP.NET suffers from this classic padding oracle attack. More specifically, they found a universal padding oracle vulnerability that supposedly affects every ASP.NET web application. They claimed attackers can leverage this flaw to decrypt cookies, view states, form authentication tickets, membership passwords, user data, and anything else encrypted using the ASP.NET framework’s API. As a result of these researcher’s findings, Microsoft has decided to release an out-of-band security update to correct this issue.

According to Microsoft’s out-of-band security bulletin, the ASP.NET components that ship with the .NET Framework suffer from an information disclosure vulnerability due a padding oracle flaw like the one described above. By repeatedly sending web requests containing a cipher text to a vulnerable ASP.NET web server, an attacker could interpret the error messages returned by the web server to eventually gain enough information to read or tamper with encrypted data. This would allow the attacker to gain access to significant amounts of sensitive information from your web server, and in one example, attackers even demonstrated how this leak could be leveraged to attack and potentially gain full access to the server.

Researchers have already released tools and shared examples showing how you can leverage this vulnerability. Furthermore, Microsoft has also seen evidence of attackers leveraging this flaw in the wild. If you have a web server using the .NET Framework, we highly recommend you update it immediately.

For more technical detail about this flaw, check out the articles in the References section below.

Solution Path:

Microsoft has released .NET Framework updates to fix this vulnerability. If you have web servers that use the .NET Framework, you should download, test and deploy the corresponding update immediately:

** Server Core Installation Not Affected

For All Users:

This attack leverages normal looking HTTP requests, which you must allow for you users to reach the web. Therefore, Microsoft’s patches are your primary recourse.

Status:

Microsoft has released updates to correct this vulnerability.

References:

This alert was researched and written by Corey Nachreiner, CISSP.

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