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User accounts disclosed to unauthenticated actors on the LAN

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Dec 14, 2023 in home-assistant/core

Package

pip homeassistant (pip)

Affected versions

< 2023.12.3

Patched versions

2023.12.3

Description

Summary

The login page discloses all active user accounts to any unauthenticated browsing request originating on the Local Area Network.

Details

Starting the Home Assistant 2023.12 release, the login page returns all currently active user accounts to browsing requests from the Local Area Network. Tests showed that this occurs when:

  • The request is not authenticated and
  • The request originated locally, meaning on the Home Assistant host local subnet or any other private subnet (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16, fd00::/8, ::ffff:10.0.0.0/104, ::ffff:172.16.0.0/108, ::ffff:192.168.0.0/112)

The rationale behind this is to make the login more user-friendly (see release blog post) and an experience better aligned with other applications that have multiple user-profiles.

However, as a result, all accounts are displayed regardless of them having logged in or not and for any device that navigates to the server. This disclosure is mitigated by the fact that it only occurs for requests originating from a LAN address. But note that this applies to the local subnet where Home Assistant resides and to any private subnet that can reach it.

PoC

  1. Place a Home Assistant instance on a private subnet, i.e., 192.168.1.0/24.
  2. Create a few users, let's say, three.
  3. From any (or another) private subnet on the LAN, like 192.168.2.0/24, open an incognito browser window (to ensure that the browser has no cookies from Home Assistant and therefore is demonstrably unauthenticated) and navigate to the Home Assistant URL.
  4. The login page will display all three users, including their profile photo.

Impact

The following CVSS string could be shaped to describe the overall impact of this issue:
AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N

As seen, the Exploitability metrics are high, and the Impact metrics are low. This is fitting because the problem does not constitute a critical one, but at the same time, it is trivial to exploit. Still, since the mitigation can be so easily implemented in code to eliminate a typical case of information disclosure, it would certainly be worth pursuing.

References

@frenck frenck published to home-assistant/core Dec 14, 2023
Published by the National Vulnerability Database Dec 15, 2023
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Dec 15, 2023
Reviewed Dec 15, 2023

Severity

Moderate

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Adjacent
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
None
Availability
None

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N

EPSS score

0.089%
(40th percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2023-50715

GHSA ID

GHSA-jqpc-rc7g-vf83

Source code

Credits

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