Advisories

Insecure PRNG and Information Exposure in urwid Web Display Backend

Go Back
severity
critical
date
Affecting
  • urwid <= 24acd12

CWE
  • CWE-338 Use of Cryptographically Weak Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG)
CVSS
9.2
CVSS V4 Vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Credit
Katriel Moses
Description
The urwid web display backend (urwid/display/web.py) generates web session identifiers (urwid_id) in Screen.start() by concatenating two random.randrange(10**9) calls that use Python's Mersenne Twister PRNG, which is not cryptographically secure. Each call consumes approximately 30 bits of PRNG state, and the Mersenne Twister internal state is approximately 19,937 bits, so an attacker who observes approximately 334 session IDs (for example via the X-Urwid-ID HTTP response header) can fully reconstruct the internal state and predict all past and future session IDs (Path B). The same identifier is also used as the filename of a FIFO created in the world-listable /tmp directory (for example /tmp/urwid375487765176907690.in), so any local user on the host can list /tmp to enumerate active session tokens directly (Path A). With a valid session ID, an attacker can read the victim's terminal screen via the polling endpoint, inject keystrokes into the victim's session (yielding OS-level code execution with the session owner's privileges if the session runs a shell), and inject exit sequences or flood the FIFO to terminate or crash the session. A prior Bandit S311 warning on this usage was suppressed with # noqa: S311 rather than fixed

Ready to get Started?

Explore VulnCheck, a next-generation Cyber Threat Intelligence platform, which provides exploit and vulnerability intelligence to help you prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities that matter.
  • Vulnerability Prioritization
    Prioritize vulnerabilities that matter based on the threat landscape and defer vulnerabilities that don't.
  • Early Warning System
    Real-time alerting of changes in the vulnerability landscape so that you can take action before the attacks start.