Flurnet Security ---------------- Application: PalmVNC 1.40 Developer(s): Harkan Software (http://www.harakan.btinternet.co.uk/PalmVNC/) Vladimir Minenko (http://www.wind-networks.de/PalmVNC/) Scope: VNC passwords saved in plaintext with backup bit. Tested on: PalmVNC 1.40 (older versions probably vulnerable) PalmVNC saves passwords in plaintext, relying on the fact that PalmOS is hard to navigate, and thus finding the corresponding records would be relatively difficult. This is not the case. VNC stores saved passwords in a database called: PalmVNCDB with creator ID: PVNC/Data. To make matters worse, this database is configured with the 'backup bit' and thus it is copied into the users directory on any PC that the palm synchronizes with (filename: PalmVNCDB.PDB). The PalmVNCDB database contains record #0 (4bytes- nothing interesting) followed by records for each saved server profile. These profile records are typically 172 bytes long and contain VNC server ip or hostname, username and password in plaintext. Suggested solutions: - Encrypt this database and code client support. - If it is critical that PalmVNC is used, it is not recommended that passwords be saved. - Unset the backup bit on PalmVNCDB (2 attribute bytes in the PDB header after 32 byte null terminated name. Unset 0x0008.) ____________________ __ _ ~FluRDoInG flurat_private http://www.flurnet.org KEY ID 0x8C2C37C4 (pgp.mit.edu) RSA-CAST 2048/2048 1876 B762 F909 91EB 0C02 C06B 83FF E6C5 8C2C 37C4
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue May 27 2003 - 12:38:37 PDT