qtpass generates possibly predictable and enumerable passwords

Bug #1747954 reported by Uli Tillich
10
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
qtpass (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Philip Rinn

Bug Description

Description
===========
It was discovered that QtPass before 1.2.1, when using the built-in password generator, generates possibly predictable and enumerable passwords. This only applies to the QtPass GUI. The generator used libc's random(), seeded with srand(msecs), where msecs is not the msecs since 1970 (not that that'd be secure anyway), but rather the msecs since the last second. This means there are only 1000 different sequences of generated passwords.

The problem has been fixed upstream in version 1.2.1. (planned to be shipped with ubuntu 18.04)

Impact
======
Passwords generated using QtPass can potentially be recovered by an attacker due to the use of a non-cryptographically secure random number generator with a predictable seed. It is recommend to change all passwords created by QtPass.

References
==========
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/01/05/5
https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/password-store/2018-January/003165.html
https://github.com/IJHack/QtPass/issues/338
https://github.com/IJHack/QtPass/commit/e7bd0651335e1bf4f01512d1555fe0b960ff1787
https://security.archlinux.org/CVE-2017-18021

CVE References

Uli Tillich (utillich)
description: updated
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Philip Rinn (rinni) wrote :

Hi,

QtPass uses `pwgen` to generate passwords by default. This means, if you didn't change the configuration to use the built-in password generator your passwords are safe. If you used the built-in password generator, change all passwords you generated with QtPass.

So, the number of affected people using the Ubuntu/Debian version should be rather low. Nonetheless there are fixed version available in bionic and I prepared a fix for qtpass 1.1.6 (the version in artful) which Ubuntu could copy from Debian stable-proposed-updates.

You should point the Ubuntu security team to the fixed version for artful (1.1.6-1+deb9u1) and ask them to copy it from Debian s-p-u.

Hope that helps

Philip

Revision history for this message
Philip Rinn (rinni) wrote :

I prepared a debdiff against the package in artful. It's the same patch as for the version in Debian stable (which was already approved and is in stable proposed updates now -> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=886593).

Changed in qtpass (Ubuntu):
assignee: nobody → Philip Rinn (rinni)
status: New → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package qtpass - 1.1.6-1ubuntu0.1

---------------
qtpass (1.1.6-1ubuntu0.1) artful-security; urgency=low

  * SECURITY UPDATE: Insecure built-in password generator (LP: #1747954)
    - debian/patches/01-fix-password-generator.patch: Fix password generator
    - debian/NEWS: Warn users to eventually regenerate their passwords
    - CVE-2017-18021

 -- Philip Rinn <email address hidden> Tue, 27 Feb 2018 10:45:10 +0100

Changed in qtpass (Ubuntu):
status: In Progress → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Seth Arnold (seth-arnold) wrote :

Thanks Philip!

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