[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #5367: Wordpress cookie authentication vulnerability

WordPress Trac wp-trac at lists.automattic.com
Sat Dec 1 15:02:57 GMT 2007


#5367: Wordpress cookie authentication vulnerability
-------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
 Reporter:  sjmurdoch                |        Owner:  westi   
     Type:  defect                   |       Status:  assigned
 Priority:  normal                   |    Milestone:  2.4     
Component:  Security                 |      Version:  2.3.1   
 Severity:  normal                   |   Resolution:          
 Keywords:  security, password, md5  |  
-------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
Comment (by westi):

 Replying to [comment:21 sjmurdoch]:
 > There are roughly two approaches to dealing with this problem.
 >
 > Sessions involves a record being kept of each login session, which PHP
 already has existing infrastructure for this. The down side is that there
 is a database write for each login, and the size of the session table
 scales with the number of active sessions. Alternatively there can be a
 restriction of one session per user, as in westi's patch.
 >
 > An alternative is to use something along the lines of the
 [http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-
 disclosure/2007-November/058611.html papers] I mentioned earlier. This
 supports multiple sessions per user, with no need to store extra state.
 Database writes are only needed on changing the password.
 >
 > A variant of this is to store the hash post-image of a cookie in the
 database, which means someone with read access to the database can't
 generate a valid cookie. The down side of this approach is that some
 fairly subtle cryptography is needed. I think it's possible to do with
 MD5, but will need some thought.

 I will have a read through those and try to understand how we can
 implement them.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5367#comment:23>
WordPress Trac <http://trac.wordpress.org/>
WordPress blogging software


More information about the wp-trac mailing list