[Full-disclosure] Oracle - Hardcoded Password and Password Reset of OUTLN User [DB13]

2008-04-1600:00:00

vulners.com

JSON

Oracle - Hardcoded Password and Password Reset of OUTLN User [DB13]

Systems Affected 9i Rel. 1 - 10g Rel. 2
Severity High Risk
Category Hardcoded Default Password & Password Reset
Vendor URL http://www.oracle.com/
Author Alexander Kornbrust
Advisory 16 April 2008 (V 1.00)
Advisory URL http://www.red-database-security.com/advisory/oracle_outln_password_change.html

Details
During the creation of a materialized view the package
DBMS_STATS_INTERNAL is called and resets the password of the user
OUTLN to OUTLN and grants DBA privileges to this user.

[…]
GRANT_DBA_OUTLN:= 'grant dba to outln identified by outln';
[…]
GRANT_DBA_OUTLN:= 'grant on commit refresh to outln identified by
outln';
[…]

Many people are not aware that the GRANT command ("GRANT CONNECT TO
SYS IDENTIFIED BY FD2008") can be used to change passwords in Oracle
instead of using the "ALTER USER" command . It's a bad idea to
hardcode passwords and it took only 1 year to fix this issue.

In most Oracle default installations the account OUTLN is locked but
some security guidelines (e.g. Oracle Practical Security from
Syngress) recommend to unlock the account OUTLN and set an invalid
password (to avoid the error message "ORA-28000 account is locked").
Following this advisory and setting an invalid password is opening a
default user with default password with DBA privileges in the Oracle
database (OUTLN/OUTLN) if a materialized view was created.

I found this vulnerability during the search for backdoors in Oracle
databases for the Oracle malware report of our vulnerability scanner
Repscan. I was looking for the strings like "grant dba to" and found
that dbms_stats_internal is executing these commands in an internal
package. In Oracle 9i you can find these strings using the grep
command in $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin because strings literals are not
encrypted in wrapped PL/SQL 9i Code.
BTW: During this research I found also 3 Oracle procedures modifying
the Oracle Audit-Table (Insert/Update/Delete rows from SYS.AUD$). I
think procedures modifying the Audit-Log (especially delete and
update) are a bad coding practice.

Patch Information
Apply the patches for Oracle CPU April 2008.

History
4-apr-2007 Oracle secalert was informed
15-apr-2008 Oracle published CPU April 2008 [DB13]
16-apr-2008 Advisory published

Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/

JSON