Researchers discovered that the Passwordstate enterprise password manager made by Australian company Click Studios is affected by serious vulnerabilities that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to obtain a user’s passwords.
The security holes, patched in early November with the release of version 9.6 build 9653, were reported to the developer in August by Swiss cybersecurity firm Modzero.
Modzero researchers discovered a total of seven types of vulnerabilities in Passwordstate, including issues related to authentication and authorization bypass, improper password protection, hardcoded credentials, and a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw.
An API authentication bypass tracked as CVE-2022-3875 has been assigned a ‘critical’ severity rating. It can allow an unauthenticated attacker to bypass authentication for the Passwordstate API, enabling them to gain access to a user’s website passwords, one-time passwords (OTPs), password lists, and other secrets by knowing only their username.
The remaining security holes have been rated ‘medium’ or ‘low’, but they can still pose a significant risk when chained with other vulnerabilities.
Modzero researchers demonstrated how an attacker who knows the targeted individual’s username could forge an API token for that username, go through all password lists, add an XSS payload to the victim’s account via a new password entry (the payload is executed when the user views the entry), obtain a reverse shell on the system, and decrypt and dump all stored passwords within the compromised Passwordstate instance.
Additional technical details are available in a blog post and a report published this week by Modzero.
Threat actors have been known to target Passwordstate. In April 2021, the company urged users to reset all their passwords after a poisoned update was served through a supply chain attack.
It’s not surprising that Passwordstate is a tempting target for threat actors. Click Studios says its product is used by more than 29,000 customers, including many Fortune 500 companies.
Related: Kaspersky Password Manager Generated Passwords That Could Quickly Be Brute-Forced