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May 19, 2023

KeePass exploit helps retrieve cleartext master password – Fix ETA July 2023

Filed under: Computer Security,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 8:06 PM

Security is hard to do and no matter how careful you are while coding every software will have bugs in it and some of these bugs have major security implications. Keepass which is a very popular password manager is vulnerable to extracting the master password from the application’s memory, allowing attackers who compromise a device to retrieve the password even with the database is locked. The bug is being tracked as CVE-2023-32784.

The issue was discovered by a security researcher known as ‘vdohney’ who has unfortunately also published PoC code that exploits the vulnerability called the “KeePass Master Password Dumper” on GitHub.

KeePass Master Password Dumper is a simple proof-of-concept tool used to dump the master password from KeePass’s memory. Apart from the first password character, it is mostly able to recover the password in plaintext. No code execution on the target system is required, just a memory dump. It doesn’t matter where the memory comes from – can be the process dump, swap file (pagefile.sys), hibernation file (hiberfil.sys), various crash dumps or RAM dump of the entire system. It doesn’t matter whether or not the workspace is locked. It is also possible to dump the password from RAM after KeePass is no longer running, although the chance of that working goes down with the time it’s been since then.

Tested with KeePass 2.53.1 on Windows (English) and KeePass 2.47 on Debian (keepass2 package). PoC might have issues with different encodings (languages), but that’s not confirmed as of now (see issue #3). Should work for the macOS version as well. Unfortunately, enabling the Enter master key on secure desktop option doesn’t help in preventing the attack.

The attack does require either physical access to the system or the system would need to be infected with Malware that give an attacker remote access with the ability to perform thread dumps. They can also extract the password from the process dump, swap file (pagefile.sys), hibernation file (hiberfil.sys) or RAM dump of the entire system.

The fix for the problem is in the works and the initial testing looks promising. Personally I think that the security researcher should have waited to release the PoC code till the fix is available but to each their own I guess.

Source: Bleepingcomputer.com: KeePass exploit helps retrieve cleartext master password, fix coming soon

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